Card making is...

My favorite thing to do right now! I have been making cards like crazy and using markers and stamps. These are the cards I've made in the past week. 

Tons of thanks! 

This was done with Copic markers, distress ink, and then matted. 

Robot birthday! 

This used a stencil I created with my Cricut,  Copic markers, distress ink,  some miniature gears, and then it was layered. 

A bonus birthday card. 

This used Copic markers, a die, an embossing folder, and a white gel pen. 

A wedding shaker card. 

This used distress ink, Copic markers, the fuse tool, and a Wink of Stella Pen.

I'll be posting a few videos for how to make these cards soon. Until then, Happy Crafting! 

I love my Minc: A brief review (Heidi Swapp & Anna Griffin)

When I first said I was going to write about the Minc, I said I was going to show a hack, and that would have been using a laminator.  I will say that method works ok, you'll have to put your laminator on the highest setting and you'll probably have to run your object through 2 or 3 times...not really ideal.  A better solution? Buy a Minc, I promise it's worth it! I found mine for a really great price of $95.50 on Amazon (which is $50 less than the big box craft stores) plus shipping is free if you have Prime. Good deal! There are two machines, the Heidi Swapp, pictured below, is 12" and the Anna Griffin, linked to later in the post, is 6".  I opted for the bigger one just because I thought in the long run it would be best for me.

Before the unboxing! 

The Minc comes with 1 foil sheet, 3 tags, 2 carrier folders, and the machine.  There are tons of accessories you can buy at the local craft stores and HSN is offering an amazing bunch of Anna Griffin designs starting October 7, 2015 (some include glitter sheets). I picked up some of the toner sheets, you can punch them, cut them or emboss them prior to foiling.

Toner sheets

This is handy if you don't have a toner printer at home, but you can always get designs printed at your local copier store. In fact, I had the idea to take some of my Stampin' Up coordinating stamps and dies to stamp a sheet in black ink, take it to the copy shop, and have them print it in toner. Then I can cut out the shapes with my dies and foil the stamps! Should be cool, in my mind it is, lol.  So now the important question is, but how does it work...like a dream! 

My included tags. 

The one on the left is done with the included foil

How clean is this? 

and the one on the right is this awesome stuff:​

I used green and not this silver! 

I saw these on sale at Hobby Lobby and decided I would just try them out and they work really well.  I bought a bunch of Heidi Swapp foil too, but this comes in a few more colors and in smaller sizes. It looks like you could even cut out the negatives and use them on a different project.

The negatives! 

I am just so happy with this purchase, I absolutely love it and cannot wait to see the holiday bundles on HSN next month. My advice is to get one if you can and get ready to foil everything! 

Craftermath - An Engineer's Guide to Crafting

So I wanted to make these little rosettes I kept seeing and it occurred to me that I already had all of the materials, but I did not see any clear instructions for the sizes of paper needed.  Then I realized that they are just strips of paper in circles, so I used the circumference formula: 

c=2*pi*r

Where c= the length of your paper, r=the height of your paper, and pi can be rounded to 3.14 and the size of the finished circle across will be 2 times the value of r.  Sounds a little complex, but I'll give an example.

Say I want a rosette that is 7" across. Then my strips of paper need to be 3.5" width wise and at least 22" lengthwise, but you should do at least 24" lengthwise since the paper is folded.  To go the other way, say I have paper that is 18" lengthwise, the biggest rosette I can get from that is going to be about 5.75" across, so to be safe, I should cut the width of my strip to about 2.5"-2.75" just to be safe so I'm not stretching the paper.  This formula will work for any size rosette and you can adjust your accordion folds based on appearance, but remember, the further apart your folds are, the more you "shorten" your initial length, so always try to have extra length so you don't tear your paper, happy crafting! 

Materials needed: 

Paper of your choice, I used K & Company Double Sided paper

Glue, I used Elmer's Craft Bond

Scoring Board, I used Martha Stewart

Button

Embroidery Floss and Needle

Scalloped Die Cuts, I used my Cuttlebug, but you can also use a punch

Materials used for rosettes minus my Martha Stewart scoring board! I used one but it's not in this pic.

The above rosette is 3" across. I cut my paper 1.5" wide and 12" long. So I needed at least 9.4" length, but I wanted it to look "full" so I used the entire 12" length with 1/4" folds.

A stacked rosette. 

This was done using 20" of length and 3.5" of height, I did all of the folding and glueing and then cut 1" off the top to make 2 rosettes, 1 at 2.5" height (5" across when flattened) and 1 at 1" height (2" across when flattened) and then glued them together. 

DIY Pocket Wedding Invitations Part 2

In Part 1 we made the envelopes and part of the backing, this will show how to complete the invitation. I used Word to design my text and graphic inside of a 4" x 6" space and printed it. 

Tree graphic with 2 little birdies. 

I then cut them out and used my glue runner to adhere them to the flat part of the invitation.  I decided to move the glitter rectangle to go "inside"/behind the pocket, because I liked how it looked. 

Glitter paper in pocket. 

I also added a quote that I printed and then placed that on top of a rectangle of coordinating vellum, but let creativity be your guide, this was just what I chose. 

I also used word to type up my directions and RSVP. They directions were cut to 4" x 5.5", but anything under 5"x 7" will fit.  I cut the RSVP to 3.5" x 5.5" so that when they were stacked together they would later nicely.

Inserts in pocket. 

Now you're all done! The invitations here will fit inside A7 sized envelopes and the RSVP inserts will fit inside A2 sized envelopes.  Mine were .70 to mail each, and I also added a small Velcro closure for my invitations to give them a little, well, snap. :) Happy Crafting!