Tag custom

Secret Snowflake

CraftyK Leave a comment

The company I work for decided to take a twist on Secret Santa and offered a Secret Snowflake. On a bit of a dare, I decided to take part.

The total limit was $20 and gifts are to be dispersed across 8 work days. It wasn’t specific if you are supposed to do multiple things, but I decided to get something for each day.

I did stick with the spend limit with three days of handmade using materials already on hand. I’m not sure how many people at work know I do crafting on the side, but I think many more know now.

To learn more about our Snowflake, everyone filled out a form answering questions about favorites, likes, dislikes, that kind of thing. My person likes Universal Monsters, crows, and Pokémon. The other things were related to food and drinks, which was where my $20 went.

I made a journal/sketchbook (the last time I attempted this was 2013), this attempt went much better. I created it with two covers so my Snowflake wouldn’t have to pick where to start. I also figure they could make a second book if desired. For the covers I used the Universal Monsters and a crow. Because of the general theme, the parts that pull off worked out great.

The next thing I made was a window cling cut out of a crow. This I packaged up and did not photograph before delivery. I happened to have black window cling since I got my Cricut in 2017. It was never opened, so I took this opportunity to give it a try. I hope it’s clingy!

The last handmade was for the Pokémon theme. I did use Co-Pilot to help me figure out which Pokémon would be pink, purple, or green (favorite colors) and small enough to fit in the mini keychain I have. I found a site with lots of free individual characters and pokeballs. Something I learned was there are multiple pokeballs, which took me back to Co-Pilot to ask what you catch a Ditto with. Which is how I landed on stitching an Ultra Ball. Turns out the Ditto is pretty cool.

All the gifts were a hit. I’m glad I chose to participate. It was the highlight of my week for sure. All the planning and plotting to keep my secret and deliver above expectations.

Stitching

Ditto started: December 8, 2024

Ditto finished: December 11, 2023

Ditto stitching time: 5.5 hours

Ultra ball started: December 12, 2024

Ultra ball finished: December 13, 2023

Ultra ball stitching time: 1.75 hours

Follow current projects on Instagram @craftyk.3
Also on Snapchat

$ Support me $

May the Fourth…Be With You

CraftyK Leave a comment

First of all happy May the Fourth to all of you who celebrate! Since I have become much better at documenting projects on this blog it looks like my last May 4th card was in 2018. If you want to check it out you can here.

My brother and his family are really into Star Wars. Recently I went into the upper attic of our parents house and found some original Kenner Star Wars puzzles. I temporarily kidnapped them to make them and will be delivering them today to my brother and his family (on their porch of course) along with this card.

There were some missing pieces, but here are the puzzles:

Now to the card. I used the free fonts from dafont.com that have Star Wars looking text and some dingbats. Using the Cricut I cut out the words and images from a piece of black scrapbook paper. The base of the card is 110lb white cardstock.

cards_0420_01

I recycled the letters, but held onto the characters and ships. Can’t let awesome confetti go to waste! Then some inspiration struck and I added a little glitter glue to them. I tried to get colors as close to the movies as possible. Believe it or not there is black glitter glue, I used that and silver for the tie fighter. Had to improvise for the more metal/grey color they are.

cards_0420_02

For the inside I did the same idea as the front to finish the phrase with “be with you”.

cards_0420_04

The pictures under the black are a collage from consecutive days of my 2016 daily calendar that I use for my Star Wars cards. I really like how the front turned out, but the inside ended up a little too far to the right, but you still get the idea of what’s underneath if you study it long enough. All of the art is from A New Hope.

Follow along on Snapchat
for current projects!

wp-1517196741806..jpg

Fur Babies Mug

CraftyK Leave a comment

fur baby mug_0218_02

I’m trying to branch out my crafting. Joining a few Cricut groups on Facebook at my cousin’s suggestion really spurs the creative juices. When I looked at my calendar for February I saw that a friend of mine had a birthday coming up. She is like me and loves her fur babies as her children, so I came up with this idea to send her a birthday gift.

This is my first exploration into iron on. That I didn’t even iron on. Since receiving a Cricut for Christmas, I have been exploring new crafting techniques. With it I have upped my card game and now have decorated a mug.

Since I started learning more about stamping and embossing I ended up with a heat gun. I thought that might be a way to adhere the iron on pieces to a mug. And it actually worked! I have a lower temp heat gun for the embossing so it probably took longer than normal to get everything to stick, but it worked nonetheless.

fur baby mug_0218_01For this project I found a black mug and the white glitter iron on from Cricut. At first I was going to use vinyl, but then decided to try iron on after reading a couple blogs that made it seem possible to do.

 

Then I had to sit down and pick some fonts from my vast collection of them. Once I got that settled I laid it out in the Cricut design space. I made sure to attach the words “my”, “fur”, and “babies”. This is very important if you are using some sort of transfer tape. Which of course I didn’t. But I at least had the correct letters next to each other to easily transfer it by eyeballing it.

fur-baby-mug_0218_04.jpg

 

Here’s a close up of the finished mug, everything looks like it’s stuck down!

Now it’s time to ship it off and hope for the best on how long it lasts. I will be sending it with a cute note about it being handmade and it shouldn’t go in the dishwasher or microwave.