I'm back at it!

Hello there

Yes, yee hah! I'm back to doing some crafting. I've been in Florida on holiday for two weeks and I've also been to Aviemore in Scotland for a week in August, so it's not been a great crafting time. I did actually make an ipad case in the week between Aviemore and Florida but I can't find the photos anywhere. I suspect that's because they got deleted from the sim card, trying to make room for more holiday pics. I definitely want to make at least one more, so hopefully I'll share the photos before they disappear off the face of the planet.
The only crafting I managed in Florida was a trip to Joanne's in Altamonte. I was in there two hours whilst the family had to look around there too. I had no idea I'd been that long until I left. They had so much fabric in there and so neatly displayed and easy to get it; I loved it.

Alright, enough of embarrasing photos, back to the matter in hand, which is actually meant to be a card I've made for the birthday of a friend of my daughter's. I wanted to use the Indian Summer papers from the latest Craftseller magazine. My daughter looked through the samples and chose one but then I remembered about a card I'd seen over at My Craft Spot blog which uses negative images. So I just went ahead and did the card I wanted to do. I'll probably still have to make the one she chose but I'm hoping she'll prefer the design of the one I've made - fingers crossed!

I started off by cutting out all the papers and embellishments and added bits of Glossy Accents and glitter where I thought would be nice.

I used a 15cm x15cm card blank and then cut the patterned paper a few millimetres smaller than that and then cut the top piece from Neenah super smooth card at about 14cm or smaller; sorry, I'm not much use with measuring as I usually just hand cut the same size pieces down to the size I physically can see I need.

Firstly I stamped 'Happy' up the bottom left hand corner and then I cut 'birthday' out vertically with Plantin School Book using the roly poly button. In my trial cut, I used 1.5cm but I thought it was a bit too tight to the edges, so I changed the setting to m.m's and made the letters 13m.m; real dial size too. Your sample cut will show you whereabouts you need to start cutting the word to make sure it fits on and also so that it's high enough to allow room for the words 'to you' underneath.

 I used Pinflair glue to place that mat on top of the patterned paper, ensuring it was raised slightly; this gives the best result for seeing the paper through the negative letters.

Once that had dried, I cut the balloons from Create a Critter using standard shift. I cut the tails off two of them and replaced them with cherry red Baker's Twine, tied together at the end.

A bit of a tip for new Cricut expression users; to find an image on your cartridges, use the image search facility on Cricut Craft room. It's brilliant as it gives the results in either image order or cartridge order, so you can not only pick the best ones you have but also be able to go straight to that cartridge to get it cut. I'd also suggest you do keep the software of your machine up to date. I had to update mine whilst doing this card; it feels like a real pain at the time but it's important to keep it usable for you.

Since I had cut out the balloon shapes on a practise piece of card, I was left with the stencil of those shapes, so I put it to good use by putting the balloon shapes on the envelope and inside the card. It finishes the whole package off nicely in my opinion.

Let's hope my daughter agrees.

Take care out there.

P.S For those of you paying attention, I'll try to remember to show you how I actually use the embellishments from the magazine in another post, as I didn't actually use any on this card :-)