DD's Birthday Card

Feeling a bit "cricut-ed" out, I opted to make a simpler card for my daughter on her 16th birthday.  I did use my cricut to cut out the circles and scalloped circle which is from Easter 2010.  I tried out my new liquid pearls and was fairly successful minus one or two "blobs":-)  The sentiment is from Scrappy Moms and the design paper is from Target.

Birthday Party Invites

I made some fairly simple birthday party invites for my oldest daughter's birthday party.  She turned 16 today and wants to have a BBQ with her friends to celebrate this momentous occasion.  I needed to make 18 of these so I kept them simple also to help make them more "post office friendly":-)  I will have you know there are a lot of layers on that hamburger!!  They go together easily but took a good one hour to glue all 18!!  I did it during soccer practice:-)

I used Simply Charmed for the hamburger and Cricut Keystone for BBQ.  The rest was done on the computer.  Like I said, simple!!

Happy Easter

Whew!!  What a full and fun weekend!!  Saturday morning my youngest daughter had a soccer game and this week it was a sunny day for the game!!  Yeah!!  She played great for her 2nd game ever:-)  The rest of Saturday was spent getting ready for Easter and doing "sunny-day"chores!  I have great kids - they mowed the lawn and washed both of our cars.  My hubby worked on our garden beds - he is building us 3 raised beds this year.  I snuck in a nap cuz I am still getting over an icky cold.
Easter Sunday my husband was in our church's play and had to be there early for both services so it was just us girls going to service together.  Here is a picture of the four of us -

I made a couple of Easter boxes to give to the neighbor boys.  We put some craft goodies and a matchbox car inside the boxes.  They are on a special diet so no candy for them this year.  I used a digital stamp from Doodlepantry and colored it in with Bic It markers - nothing fancy.  The box is from TBBM.

Penguin Happy Birthday

Made a "quick" (are they ever?!) card for my oldest daughter to give to her friend for her 16th bday.  Her friend loves penguins so I jazzed up the penguin girl from Simply Charmed by adding the birthday hat from the same cartridge.  The present is also from that cartridge. 

I have entered this card into this week's challenge at  Birthday Sundaes.

Easter Card #2

I don't seem to ever have enough time to make all of the seasonal cards I want to but I managed to squeeze in another Easter card.  Nothing fancy.  I wanted to try out the rabbit from Gypsy Wanderings.  The tulips are from Create a Critter and the grass is from PDDU.  I am entering this one in the challenge over at FCCB.

Flower Card for Mother's Day Challenge

over at Cardztv.  I pulled out Hello Kitty greetings, a cartridge I haven't used in a long time.  I designed the card on my gypsy in order to size a flower to fit on the front of the card.  The challenge at CardzTv is to design a Mother's Day card using the colors blue, green, purple and white.  The background of my card is a dark purple if you can't tell by the picture.  Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful Thursday!!

Blog Awards

I am so far behind on these so I apologize to those of you who awarded them to me.  I was busy and then got sick and then got busy again and all of a sudden I was behind on these, oops!!  I was awarded 4 different awards over the last month so I am going to start with one of the first awards I received -

  I received this award from Kimberly at hellocutiecrafts.blogspot.com She has an awesome blog and I am not surprised that she was awarded this.  So now I need to tell 8 things about myself -
1.  My real name is Nicole (not teachdanz:-)
2.  I LOVE chocolate!! 
3.  I am a Christ follower.
4. I teach for a Christian dance studio and love doing it!
5. I am afraid of drains esp. the big ones in swimming pools.  It is a disorder fondly named (by me) "suck-phobia"
6.  I hate dusting!!
7.  I have watched all of the seasons of Survivor!!
8.  I love summer!!


I am passing this award onto these blogs:
1.http://scrappincookie.blogspot.com/
2.http://thecricutbug.blogspot.com/
3. http://stampinwitheerlinda.blogspot.com/
4.http://sarahvaitstamps.blogspot.com/


congratulations ladies!!  I enjoy your blogs and wanted to let you know!!

Gift bag and matching card

I realized that I have not fully utilized most of my cartridges' potential yet.  I have done a few cuts on each cartridge.  There are even a few cartridges I have not even used**gasp!!**  so, I challenged myself to try a new cut yesterday.  I used the Tags, Bags, Boxes and More and cut the inchie bag.  I cut it fit to page and added a handle.  I used a cut from Storybook to decorate the front of the bag and then used the negative image from that cut to make a matching card.  (Diane from Capadia Designs would be so proud of me for that)  I love these colors together - light aqua, dark lavendar and white. 

There has been very little sunlight these past few days out here in Oregon (constant rain and gray, ugh!!) so it has been tricky trying to get a great picture of my projects.  Thanks for looking and hope you have a DRY and wonderful weekend in your neck of the woods:-)

Easter Card for My Nephews

2 of my nephews are being baptized Easter morning but unfortunately we cannot make it to their baptism because it is out of town and my husband is involved with our church's Easter drama.  I made this card to send to the boys to let them know how excited we are for them to be baptized!!  I used the cross from the Easter 2010 cartridge and the frame is from Twinkle Toes.  I blinged it up a bit with my irock cuz I thought it was a bit drab. 

Thank You Notes

I made these super simple thank you notecards for my youngest daughter to use to thank all of her wonderful friends for her birthday presents.  They are just a "card front".  I used a stamp from Scrappy Moms.

Cute Gift Card Holder

Between my 3 girls and their friends and our family we have lots of birthdays in April.  Last weekend there were 4 birthday parties on the schedule (one was the now famous Lego Rock Band Party at our house:-).  This weekend it is one party.  There are a few more on the agenda after this one too so I made this gift bag to house a gift card for one of the upcoming parties.  I used Tags, Bags, Boxes and More and cut it fit to page.

Lego Rock Band Projects

I am part of the blog hop "A New Season A New Skill"  which starts over at craftingmisfit.  The challenge for us was to try a new skill or something we had never done before.  This is what I did -

Vinyl
 I have done a little bit of work with vinyl on the magnetic/dry erase boards I have been making but not much more than that.  Sunday was my youngest daughter's birthday party and I used vinyl to decorate some plastic water bottles I bought from Wal-Mart.   I made one of the little girl's especially happy because she has an unusual name and has never been able to buy a product with her name on it before:-)

Added the musical notes to fit the theme of the party!

Banner
I also decided to make a banner for my daughter's birthday party.  She had a "Lego Rock Band" party and this is the first time I had ever made a banner.  I used Twinkle Toes for the base of the banner and Mickey Font for the letters as well as Smiley Cards for the guitars.
 

Notice the googley (is that a word?) eyes!!

Shrinky Dinks

I also cut out shrinky dink material using my cricut.  I cut out the guitar from Smiley Cards but only used the shadow feature.  I found that setting my regular blade at 6 my pressure at high and multicut 2x worked great.

The kids colored them in with colored pencils.  

This shows how I laid the cuts out on the mat.

Baking in the oven.

The final product!!

Thanks for taking the time to look at my projects and have a wonderful week!!  You should now hop on over to Melissa.

Lego Rock Band Party A Hit!!

whew!!  we made it through the party and everyone had fun:-)  Here are a couple of pics of the cupcakes we had.  I decorated them with Lego candy.  I will be posting some of the projects I made for the party tomorrow for the blog hop I am participating in so check back in!!

Ballet Shoe Birthday Card and Upcoming Blog Hop

I made this birthday card quickly today for a birthday party my two older daughters were invited to.  The birthday girl is one of my dance students so I just HAD to make a dance related card and use my Twinkle Toes Cartridge!!  I chose the ballet shoes because my student loves ballet:-)  I was pleased with how the card came out because I didn't have a lot of time to make it but sad when I smudged some of the ink on the shoe while stamping the sentiment.  Oh well, this time it had to be "good enough". 

I am participating in my first ever blog hop on Monday, April 11th.  Check out the blinkie on my sidebar.  I have tried several "new" projects today using my cricut and I will be posting one or more of those for the blog hop.  Have a great day!!

It's April Fools Day!!

and that means it is also my youngest daughter's birthday!!  YEAH!!  She turns 9 years old today.  This is the card I made for her.   Not one of my best but I think she will like it.  She is not really into the color pink but she loves strawberry ice cream.  I used Martha Stewart fine glitter on the top scoop.  I think I will enter this into the challenge over at card creations & more by c.

It's April Fool's Day and. . .

that means it is my youngest daughter's 9th birthday!!  YEAH!!  She is not really fond of the color pink but she loves strawberry ice cream so I went with the pink because of that:-)  I also used some Martha Stewart fine glitter on top of the paper to give it some pizzazz!  I think I will enter this card in the challenge over at cardcreationsbyc.blogspot.com.  Hope you had a great April Fool's Day - we did!! This morning as we were driving to school we were chased down by a mountain of bubbles!!  Somebody put soap in our neighbor's pond and the bubbles were EVERYWHERE!!  A pile of the bubbles was several feet high and was gliding towards our car like a ghost.  It was hilarious!!