May the Fourth…Be With You

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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The PINK Flamingo is back!

It’s another multi-birthday day. My mom and a second cousin. This card is for my second cousin who loves flamingos. Not sure if it’s the color or just the love of the bird, but she’s loved them for years.

flamingo in progress

This one didn’t take too long to stitch, but my focus was a bit off and ended up with a small error in counting. It’s not really that noticeable, but the neck is a little farther over than it should be.

top half

I knew for this card that glitter glue was a must. I couldn’t find the color of paper I wanted so I went with construction paper in a hot pink (didn’t photograph so well) and some American Girl themed scrapbooking paper. I really wanted to emboss this one and then fill in areas with glue, it didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped, but it works.

bottom of flamingo

I used double sided tape for all the paper and foam tape for the cross stitch. The two papers are cut out and taped onto folded cardstock. I’ve found this works much better than trying to make paper be a card. Instead I try to assemble the card to a solid base. This also helps by making the inside and back of card white. Easy to write in and stamp the back.

Stitching

Started: July 13th
Finished: July 16th

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full front of card

Will you be my Valentine?

So that title is a bit misleading. As this is posting the day of, I can’t get a card out that fast. I wanted to share the 3 cards I did make this year and sent out in time to reach their destinations (Colorado and Georgia). The third card was for my husband, so it didn’t have to go through the rigors of the post office!

After posting on Snapchat my newly acquired glitter glue, and asking who might want a card, my husband’s cousin responded that she did. The problem was I couldn’t think of a card to make, so I asked her what holiday or something I should do. She reminded me that Valentine’s Day was coming up. So I got started coming up with some concepts after browsing the Cricut library and not finding something I wanted.

I thought it would be fun to show my concepts for these cards I drew up on my phone (the Note 8, no icrap in this house). Anyway…I find myself telling people quite frequently that I can’t draw worth crap, what’s in my head does not translate into hand-drawn pretties.

Georgia

This is the card that made it’s way to Georgia. It’s pretty flat so I wasn’t worried about it surviving. This was also the most frustrating of the three because I wasn’t able to truly capture what was in my head.

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First, I couldn’t find the heart ‘o’ in the fonts that I have. I could have sworn I had one, but was unable to find it and didn’t want to sort through all internet font options. But I think the teddy bear holding a heart does the trick.

Second, my sun ray type things just wouldn’t work for me. I thought I could do it, but things just didn’t translate, so it’s a bit messy for what I wanted.

Finally, the Cricut…Took me a few goes to actually realize it gives itself a margin where it won’t cut. So my card was placed right, but all the cuts are a good quarter inch to the right. I am hoping to be able to better compensate for this with future cards that have a peek through. Luckily I figured out the whole cut/draw on one mat thing so the drawing ended up where it should.

The paper background is discontinued wallpaper that has a silver sheen to it.

 

Colorado

This card I worried about so much. The button was thicker than I thought while I was picking it, and then the hot glue gun decided it wanted to create a huge glue glob.. you get the idea. I was very happy with the fact that I used some press n’ seal to get the adhesive foil up and onto the card. It took some patience, but worth it for not ruining the paper.

vday rhea

It was my first time transferring something using some sort of sticky material. My first card had all the letters connecting so I just picked it up and placed it where I wanted it. I am also happy that everything came out fairly straight.

The base of the flower I drew in Illustrator and then had the Cricut draw it with a gold pen.

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The Husband

This card took the most in terms of intricacy. I also tried my hand at drawing in Illustrator…luckily it help clean up really bad curves. This is the only card with some outside inspiration. I saw this Pin once, thought I remembered the general idea, until just now, looking at it I really didn’t do mine the same at all. What caught my eye was the overlapping hearts and Love intertwined (at least that’s how I remembered it). I wanted to recreate something like that and ended up with my own overlapping heart with the word coming off that.

vday mike

I used the same wallpaper and gold glitter glue as the piece above. I also used my new stencils to create the bottom arrows with acrylic paint that looks good with the gold theme I have going on.

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After photographing these cards I realized (when it was at least 1am) that this card was missing something. It was the glitter on the arrows. It took so much effort to go to bed and not start working on “fixing” the card that night. I was good, got some zzz’s (I think) and worked on this first thing in the morning. It helped the card so much, finally coming together to look more professional.

 

 

2018 Valentine’s Day card set

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