Card class at Scraptopia

Hello,
Your absentee blogger signing in here!!! Wow, I'm a little embarrassed to see it's been soooo long since I posted anything! It was a very busy summer--well and fall to I guess, seen as it's Thanksgiving Monday here in Canada, as well as the fact that I spent the day in my scrap room creating Christmas cards for my card class at Scraptopia in Nov.

So without further delay, here are the 3 cards I will be offering in the class. The cost is $5, and all you have to supply is the basic tools, and adhesive. All the cutting will be pre-done. You'll simply watch how each card is done, then rotate through the stations and make your creations.

If you are attending Scraptopia in Muskoka this Nov and would like to sign up for the class, send me an e-mail at scrapnyapwithcarolyn@gmail.com, and get your name on the list. Space is limited to 20 for this class.

Also let me know if there is anything you would like to order for Scraptopia, send me an e-mail and I will make sure to have it there for you! It's simply that easy.

The floating ornament card; learn how to stamp using 2 colours on the same stamp.

The Cardinal card; relive the joy of colouring!

 

The "special" gift card; enjoy seeing how easy our new exclusive Cricut "Artiste" Cartridge makes cards! 

 

a peek at the inside of the Gift Card-card.

 

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look.

A new exclusive CTMH cricut cartridge! Oh MY!

You all know how much I LOVE my Art Philosophy cartride, WELL, CTMH has done it again! Another exclusive cartridge called "ARTISTE" and oh my, what a collection!

There is soooo much on this cartridge that you are just going to love! Lot's more 3-D items, along with an instruction book on how to assemble the 3-D items. Cupcake wrappers, lot's more flowers and tags, and cards. And of course a font too! Again over 700 images on one cartridge.

If you want to have a better understanding of what I'm "yappin" about be sure to check out this video that the wonderful Beverly (a sister consultant) posted, and generously gave us permission to share. You can visit her blog here.  She's one lucky duck, who was able to get her consultant preview copy delivered within days.

The cartridge is available for sale begining on Aug 1! Want to pre-order yours, just send me an e-mail at scrapnyapwithcarolyn@gmail.com and I will take care of the order for you! Or you can visit my shopping site on Aug 1st and have it delivered directly to your door! Just click on the shopping cart at the top of my blog!

Stay tuned in the next few days for more info regarding the new Idea book and all the great new products!

Have a great day!

Teacher Gifts (with Dotty of course!)

I just love how my exclusive Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge makes whipping up some little teacher gifts soooo easy! (Don't know if I've mentioned before how in LOVE I am with this cartridge **sheepish grin**) Seriously though, when I realized that it was Teacher Appreciation week, and mentioned it to my daughter, and we came up with a plan, we were able to pump these babies out in record time!!

The pillow box contains a bag of microwave popcorn, and I'd love to give credit to someone for the poem, but it's been around for a while and I can't quite track down where it originated from. This gift was for her regular classroom teacher, who is diabetic, so the popcorn was a great alternative to the chocolates in the next group!

These next little gifts were for her extra teachers....music, french, drama...so we made 3 of these and  filled them with mini chocolate bars!

 The matchbook cards with Tea bags were for all the other teachers in the school (luckily it's a small school) we were on a roll and didn't want to leave anyone out, so we pumped out 20 of these guys in under an hour! Again super easy with the cartridge and coordinating stamp sets--just set my cricut to cut the desired shape 20x at the size that's conveniently located on the stamp carrier sheet, then did the same thing for the background tag increasing the size by 1/4".

Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies used;
Dotty paper pack
White daisy cardstock
Sweet leaf ink pad
Sunset ink pad
Thoughtful Tidings stamp set (Feb 2012 SOTM)
Art Philosophy exclusive  stamp set and cartridge

I'm Sew Happy....with Dotty!

Thought I'd share with you this quick card I made. OK making the flower not so quick....but once it was done everything else came together supper fast.

This is also my entry into Heart 2 Hearts April Showers bring May flowers challenge this week.

What made this card soooo simple is the CTMH exclusive Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge, the card base, the sweet leaf dotty paper and all the flowers were cut using the cartridge! I'll also note that the Sweet Leaf stitched grosgrain ribbon made gathering the ribbon easy because the stitching is already in the ribbon, just grab the white stitching and pull the ribbon back.

Directions for making the flower:
Cut 4 flowers at 2", and a 5th flower at 2 1/4" (or really whatever sizes you want, but the 5th one needs to be 1/4" bigger than the other 4.
Using the Clear ruler, and a craft knife I cut 3 of the 2" flowers into 6 pieces, between the petals. The 4th one I kept whole and used as a base to glue the other 6 pieces too. This was my solution after trying unsuccessfully to glue the 6 individual pieces directly onto the bigger flower--I kept getting a gap between the last 2 petals!)
I then used the ruler with the hole guide, and my paper piercer to make the guide holes for the stitching. Then stitch away!
Add something to the middle of the flower--I found this necessary (although I would have done it anyways just to finish off the flower) simply because you sew through the middle hole so often that it's a little unsightly!

Supplies used:
-Dotty for You paper pack
-Colonial White cardstock
-Green button assortment
-Sweet leaf ink pad
-Sweet leaf embroidery floss (retired)
-Simple Stitches stamp set (retired)
-2 sided tape to hold the ribbon down
-AP cricut cartridge
-ruler

Canada Day with Dotty

The May promotion at CTMH is a Dotty Paper Pack for only $5 when you order $35 in product. I've been playing with mine, and will have lots more to show you in future posts. I've had these pictures printed since last fall and was hitting a road block every time I pulled them out to scrap them! I was cruisin some of my favourite challenge blogs yesterday and was hit with the inspiration I needed to complete this layout! Thanks to Cheryl over at Heart 2 Heart, with her April layout sketch, I was able to put this together in no time!



 Pulled out my Canadian Celebration stamp set and the AP cricut cartridge, to make the layered stars--the cartridge makes it so quick and easy! Also added in some of the new Bakers Twine. I can see getting allot of mileage with all the choices of colours in this new set!

 I had a few photos of the kids with sparklers, that weren't the greatest shots but I still wanted to include them on the layout--so I made a little interactive piece that I will have sit outside the page protector so anyone going through the album can simply untie the bakers twine and view the rest of the photo's. The trick to cutting the page protector, is to use a hole punch at both ends of your slit, to prevent the protector from ripping.

Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies used:
-Dotty paper pack
-Tulip cardstock
-White daisy cardstock
-Tulip ink pad
-bakers twine
-Canadian Celebration stamp set
-Art Philosophy cartridge

Lace & Pearls OR Bling???

I designed these 2 cards using the Mojo Monday sketch#236 and an idea from Tamra Pope  for the beautiful flowers created using the exclusive CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge. Go check out her blog (by clicking on her name) for a fantastic tutorial!! I couldn't decide between going with pearls and lace, which I thought went well with the Lucy paper pack, or the full out BLING (and I love bling!) so I made one of each....both from the same paper pack. How versatile is that!

This is also my entry for the Great Impressions Lots of Flowers challenge.

So here's the Pearls and Lace.....

Here's a close up of the flower--isn't that fantastic! There's 5 different layers to this baby!

And now for the Bling!

On both cards I used the coordinating ink on the dry embossed cardstock to better highlight the embossing. I had a hard time putting the sparkle flourish on the "bling" card--not that it's hard to use, the "hard" part was in using it on something I'm going to give away. I love these sparkles, luckily I know where I can get more!
These are going to make terrific Mothers Day cards!

Supply list:
-Lucy paper pack
-Opaques Gems- pearl
-lace ribbon (non CTMH)
-blush ink pad
-Sparkle flourish
-Bling brads
-grey wool ink pad
-Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge
-Flourish embossing plate (non CTMH)

Christmas....in April????

Yes I'm a little out of season on this one. It was actually my club layout from Dec, but I didn't have a picture to go on it when I did the layout....and I'm a little anal about making sure that I get pictures on my layouts before posting it!!!! Luckily, my sister took the perfect picture of our dad on Christmas Eve, sitting on Santa's knee. He lost his wife last year, so we haven't seen him smiling much, so this full out laugh was a welcome site!

This layout was inspired by Merilee Restucci. You can click on her name to go to her blog, she shared the template with consultants a few years ago, but her blog doesn't seem to be updated any longer, so I'm not sure she's even active anymore.

I used the exclusive CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge to cut out all the holly leaves for the layout, then gave them a quick spray with pearl paint and water in the spray pen, just for a little glimmer! Also used the cartridge for the bracket and then clear embossed the flourish on it. The paper is from the retired Mistletoe collection from 2010. I do plan to do a 2nd page to go with this layout--maybe by next Christmas I'll have that done!!!

Thanks for looking!

supplies used:
- Mistletoe paper pack (retired)
-new england ivy cardstock
-garden green cardstock
-sweet leaf cardstock
-cranberry cardstock
-chocolate cardstock -red buttons
-cranberry grosgrain ribbon
-Love Life stamp set
-versa mark
-clear embossing powder
-Martha Stewart punch  

Footloose layout and Adventure Canada.

This layout was from our Vacation last summer to Pelee Island, Ontario. The southern most spot in Canada--well the inhabited spot anyways, there is one more tiny island just south of Pelee, but no one lives there! We were amazed to find out that when on this spot we were on the same line of latitude as northern California!!!

I used the Adventure Canada stamp set to make the map of Canada, but the island isn't on the map so....my "X" is actually off the map!

 The priority for my husband was to do the 2km hike through the Provincial park that is at the bottom tip of the Island so that he could say that he truly stood on the spot most southern. So that's what inspired the layout as well as the title of the layout.

 This layout went together soooo extremely easy because I used the sand like paper from Footloose as well as a simple 1" stripe from another pattern in the paper pack with the zip strips from the top and a little matting. So easy!

This is also my entry into Scrpbookers Anonymous' April challenge to use a map and brads on your layout.

Supplies used:

-Footloose pattern paper

-creme brulee cardstock

-lagoon cardstock

-cocoa ink pad

-Adventure Canada stamp set

-creme brulee brads



-assorted chipboard (non CTMH)
-paint (non CTMH)
-Cricut (sorry can't recall the cartridge!)

Chief Scout Award

(this is the Yap portion of my blog, but of course I'll fit a little crafty stuff into it)

We were so proud of our son this past June when he received his Chief Scout Award, the highest award a Scout can receive. I won't get into what this involved, but trust me when I say it took allot of work and commitment on my son's part, and was the cumulation of his 8 years in Scouting. (A mother has the right to brag a little right? If you don't think so you might as well just stop reading now).

He was one of only 3 Scouts that have received this award in the last 30 years in our home town! What an honour. This is such a big deal in Scouting that they do an area award ceremony in Toronto for any Scout receiving this award every June. Unfortunately, it fell on the same day as my son's Confirmation at church. His leaders still wanted to make it special for him so they made sure to have some "brass" from Scouts Canada attend our annual end of the year BBQ to make the official presentation. I also didn't end up with many really good pictures from the event, as my eyes were filled with tears of pride and I couldn't really see what I was taking pictures of. ( I should have handed the camera off!!!) My pictures run the gamete of, eyes closed to looking the wrong way! So here is one of the better pictures....



See what I mean...not the best expression! But in this next shot you can see how very proud he is.

(here's my crafty contribution....)

So I made some desserts to share with everyone and wanted to make them special, so I borrowed my friends Cricut cake machine and cut some Fleur-de-lis out of fondant to decorate some Brownies I had made. They were a huge hit.

Just looking at these pictures again, has my mouth watering!!! And they were as yummy as they look.

I will be sure to post my layout of this event once I do it. I'm still struggling with how to do the layout with pictures that I'm not overly happy with, and still express the pride I had! I'm thinking the journaling will have to be stellar.

Christmas Cards & Tags

I will again be a vendor at Scraptopia in beautiful Muskoka on Nov 18-20th this fall. I decided to do something a little different and designed a card class and a tag class to be offered on the weekend. There will be 3 cards to make, using a variety of techniques and products. The cost for this mini card class is $5. All you need to bring is your adhesive, everything else you need will be supplied.

The Tag class will consist of 5 tags, and the cost for this class will be $3.

If you are attending Scraptopia on Nov 18-20th and would like to do either of these classes please send me an e-mail at , scrapnyapwithcarolyn@gmail.com to let me know you are interested so that I can come prepared.

Thanks for stopping by to visit.

Love this Blog!!!

Have you checked out Jeanette Lynton's blog? She is the Founder & CEO of Close To My Heart, and is quite a remarkable woman. For the month of October she is posting a project a day highlighting the exclusive CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge. Day one's project is pictured below and is just stunning. To visit her site simple click her name up above that is underlined. 

Oh, and have a GREAT weekend!

Baby Shower gift.

 My cousin and his wife are having a baby!! So we had a baby shower to go to, and I wanted to make some of the items for theirr gift. So I started with this card. It was lifted from a fellow CTMH consultant Lorrinda H. and you can visit her blog here. I used the new CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge to cut the shapes that I used for the drawer fronts, added some colonial white brads as the drawer pulls and used some 3D foam tape to pop open the 3rd drawer, so that it looked like the blanket was hanging out of the drawer. Using my blending pen and ink pads I coloured in my stamped images. All the drawer pieces were sponged with garden green around the edges to give definition to the layers.

I matted a piece of patterned paper from the Elemental paper pack, with colonial white cardstock, and used scissors to cut the fringe on the blanket.

 The next item was a paint can that I covered in more pattern paper from Elemental. I can't give credit for this idea to any one person as I have seen many of them on different blogs and boards, and I don't know who the original creator was. I wasn't sure I'd like this paper pack, but after working with it, it's so versatile, and the colours were perfect for my project. Again I was able to use the Art Philosophy Cartridge to cut out the tags and flowers as well as the boarder on the bottom of the can, that I then painted with Create-a-shade Pearl Paint to give it a softer look.

The ribbons on the handle were a bit of a challenge as I didn't have the colours I needed to match the paper. So I called on my creative side to make do with what I had. I took some grosgrain and twill ribbon in colonial white and sponged them in Garden green and Creme Brulee. I really like the way they turned out--and it was so easy to do. I'm thinking that if I just make sure to have enough colonial white grosgrain on hand and then I'll always be able to make whatever colour of ribbon I need!



  And lastly I chose to include in the package some Thank you cards. Also using that so versatile AP cartridge to cut out the card bases and tags, then using a non CTMH stamp (GASP!) I stamped the bunny and used my blender pen to colour it in. I even use the heart cutout from the tag, inside the card.

Did 15 of those little suckers!!!! Bundled them all up together along with some receiving blankets and onesies in the tin and VIOLA! I was ready with my gift.



Supplies used (CTMH unless otherwise noted)

-Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge

-creme brulee cardstock

-olive cardstock

-colonial white cardstock

-Elemental paper pack

-colonial white brads

-green button assortment

-assorted ribbons (some non-CTMH)

-paint can (available at paint stores)

-Limited Edition Stamp set -Sept 2011 SOTM

-Share the magic stamp set -Oct 2010 SOTM

-For Every Occasion stamp set

-baby stamps non-CTMH--but that bunny was just toooo cute!

-ink pads-creme brulee, garden green, olive, desert sand

-blending pen

-sponge daubers

-3D foam tape

-and of course Liquid Glass to hold it all together. Love this stuff!

Cricut Giveaway!

Close to My Heart is giving away a  Cricut Expression® machine on facebook. If you have a Facebook account enter the contest by clicking HERE!
If you don't have an account but really want a chance to win, it might just be worth it to set up an account!
Please click the link above to find out all the details! It is open to both US and Canadian residents over 18!

Sweepstakes Starts

September 12, 2011 @ 09:00 am (MDT)

Sweepstakes Ends

September 26, 2011 @ 11:59 pm (MDT)

Good Luck!

The new CTMH Ruler!

Have you seen this baby yet?

Even if you had noticed it in the new Idea book--bet you didn't quite get what was so special about this simple little (well not so little measuring in at a full 14") clear ruler. It has 2 rows of holes in it--evenly spaced as well as a red guide line for a zig zag pattern--to assist us sewing challenged scrapers. I just had to have this one, and as soon as it came in I got right down to playing.......
here's the layout I used it on....

Note the evenly spaced stitches on the sorbet cardstock strips, as well as the zig zag stitching where the pattern paper lays. The layout is still waiting for my daughter to let me know some of the things she liked best about going to camp so that I can finish the journaling on this layout! ( I need to work on taking more time to make sure that my layouts are straight before I take my pics--sorry I will get better at this)

 Here's a great close up of some of the stitching on the layout as well as some of the terrific flowers that I cut out with the new exclusive CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge, and then stamped using Hooray Bouquet stamp set D1491.

The supplies used in this layout are;
Elemental Paper pack
Olive cardstock
Desert Sand cardstock
Colonial white cardstock
Sorbet cardstock
Sorbet ink pad
Cricut Art Philosophy cartridge
Colonial white embroidery floss
colonial white brads
Canvas badge button
Red assortment buttons
Hooray Bouquet stamp set
You & Me stamp set

All of these products and more are available exclusively through Close to My Heart, and as an independent consultant I would be happy to help you get these products at a discount or even for FREE. Feel free to contact me at scrapnyapwithcarolyn@gmail.com to find out how.