The New Girl

There is a new girl in the house and she is mean, nasty and CUTE!!! Behold.....Fluffers:

Basically, like all of our cats, she was a stray that I brought in and cleaned up. She was absolutely infested with ticks and fleas. So much so that you could part her fur in any part of her body and see 2 or 3 bugs and their eggs. She had two flea dips and a thorough comb through with a flea comb and tweezers and she is as good as new! Here she is checking out my cricut machine:

So this week I made a trip to Michaels and finally got something that my lazy butt should have had ages ago. A Cuttlebug! There was a good sale so I picked up some metallic acrylic paints, D'vine swirls cuttlebug folder, some paper stacks, new Recollections vines and glittered ginko leaves, K & Company alphabet stack and the 12" x 24" K & Company stack that was on clearance. Here is my awesome haul:

The stacks are K & Company Life's Journey and DCWV Travel cardstock stack. I prefer the colors in this stack for fall rather than the actual DCWV autumn stack. They are a little more natural.

This week I cranked out some projects that I am very happy with. The first was a card using the new French Manor Cricut Cartridge. At first I was wishing that there were more layers to the images on this cartridge but once I started working with it I realized that half the fun was laying glitter, jewels and color on. It allows for a lot more creative license than my lazy butt was originally planning on working with but here is what I came up with:

And the inside:

The card feature on the cartridge was perfect and the chandelier, lion, borders and frame were a blast to sparkle up. I'm loving this cartridge more and more. In fact, I also used it to make a page for my Aunt and Uncle's wedding gift album:

I used the border feature and layer from the Eiffel Tower page 68 of the booklet and cut it using the fit to page feature which calculated out to 5". I inked the edges of the piece and adhered it to the blackout piece using Elmer's Craft Bond spray glue which is my go-to for intricate large pieces. I Then matted the photo using the K & Co Ancestry mat pad and used the diamond pieces from the cut out to create a border on all four sides. The mat is also inked using chocolate brown chalk ink. The bling is from Recollections and the die cut metallic flowers are from K & Co Handmade collection. The paper is Moda for Daisy D's in Antique Parchment - Paisley and the cut outs where done using Basic Grey paper in Mandarin Slice from the Marrakesh collection. The smaller flowers are popped up on 3-d Zots as well as the little Butterfly.

Next week I will be having a furry house guest and will also be embarking on an adventure in San Francisco. Also can't wait to share more on the bigger project that I've been working on!

Later Gators!

Summer Romance Projects

It is HOT!!! Boiling, nasty, scorching 100+ degree hot here in central California. And so needless to say, I am hiding inside. So that allows for some time to spend fiddling with paper. I recently got my hands on the gorgeous and romantic Botanicals Cricut Lite cartridge from Walmart and just love how gorgeous the intricate silhouettes are. Immediately inspired I set out cutting and came up with the following:

I used Gold shimmer and Black Recollections card stock and cut out the Snail image at 4" for a journaling spot. It will probably make a cameo in one of my upcoming projects. The bottom two pieces are a birthday card for my Aunt. The envelope is a standard brown A6 size envelope. I then cut the Vine9 image from Gold and brown card stock in order to fit the height of the envelope and attached it with my ATG gun so that the piece becomes the flap and is lifted to access the card inside. The Card was cut from Basic Grey Capella papers and the Flower4 Image on the front was cut from black and powder blue card stock at approximately 3 1/2". The double sided paper of the car is burgundy inside so I signed it with a gold gel pen and attached the creme colored ribbon like a bookmark using my ATG gun. She liked it.

The other project I have been working on was inspired by a project on the Prima webcasts that was taught by Julie Fey Fan Balzer. Rather than using prima though, I decided to use some more of the Basic Grey Capella papers. And here's what we got:

Basically it is a 12" x 12" piece of black card stock that is folded horizontally and vertically at 4" and 8" to create 9 - 4" x 4" squares. The corner squares are folded diagonally towards the center and the two squares in the center of the edges are folded into a triangle that goes from the center of the square to the two corners. It's probably easier to follow the picture than my description. The patterned papers where cut down 1/4" to allow the black card stock to peek out (3 3/4" x 3 3/4"). One unfolded center edge square has a piece of pattered paper that is 8" long in order to create the flap that secures the box closed. In the Prima project, there was a mini album in the center and the box folded up around it. I haven't decided what to put in the center but it's probably going to be something REALLY good. Like a winning lotto ticket to myself.

In life news, the student is now teaching the masters and my parents have decided to get on the faux farm bandwagon. When I say faux farm I mean having all the charms of a farm (animals, some produce, open space) with minimal work and hardly any of the dependence. We're animal lovers and so we get a real kick out of calling chickens by their first names and chatting with goats about how they slept. Pathetic really but I love my life. Anyways, their faux farm is 3 x the size of mine and has a pond. So after closing escrow two weeks ago we all went over, did some cleaning up and passed congratulations all around. Here is my mom in front of her new faux farm pond:

Stay cool (literally and figuratively)!