A Little Treat Box Encouragement

I had the opportunity to sub at my former school again. Since I was only covering middle school classes, I didn't have to spend time making up a craft project for an elementary school class, which is something I just like doing to have on hand in case there's extra time. Instead, I spent my time yesterday making little treat boxes as an encouragement to my former colleagues.

Being a teacher can be draining and frustrating. I definitely understand having done it for the last 6 years of my life! I just wanted to give them a little something to hopefully put a smile on their face at some point of the day in case they were feeling exhausted or stressed. 

I wrote the tiniest little notecards ever! They were 1.75 x 1.75 inch squares, and I just used a simple sheet of yellow polka dot paper as a layer. The sentiment is from Pink by Design's set "Pray." You can see the quick message that I wrote inside the 21 cards.

For the box, I used my new We R Memory Keepers Gift Box Punch Board that I got from Amazon with a $10 bonus gift card and credit card reward points. The instructions were really quite simple especially since I had watched the videos on how to use them on YouTube. I followed the directions to make the smallest box possible.

Scoring the paper was pretty easy as was folding it and putting it together. Unfortunately, a few of the boxes turned out the tiniest bit lopsided because the paper was very thin and I also included a packet of Jolly Rancher Crunch 'n Chew candy. I didn't realize that the ones I had were 2 per pack, so it was a little longer than I thought. It still fit, but in the beginning, I kind of squished them in there. Whoops!

I finished the 21 boxes pretty quickly. They're probably the easiest boxes I've ever assembled since the punch board does all the exact cuts and scoring for me as opposed to when I made the treat boxes last time and had to use the hole punch and tie with ribbon. 

I have to say that I get really excited putting them in everyone's mailbox in the morning. A few of my former colleagues told me they were really appreciative of the effort and sentiment. I was just happy to be able to encourage them in this little way.

Mini Cards Using Black Mats (and My Watermark!)

It's been a while since I really crafted, so it's been fun getting back into it.  I still have everything out since this past Saturday's Pink by Design marathon of challenges!  Howard and I did take pictures of the mess that was made, so I'll post those up soon.  I just wanted to show off some really simple mini cards that I made yesterday.

I know they're small, but the 3x3 cards are cute, in my opinion.  They're perfect for slipping into a bag or coat pocket as a surprise.  Plus, those strips are from the scraps that I accumulated when making the cards for my wedding favors.  I had accidentally purchased A1 envelopes last year, so I had to trim down the 8.5x11 cardstock.  I actually like the clean look of them.  I usually don't mat with black, but I think I'm going to have to do that more often!  The simplicity made it very easy since all I did was use 3 stamps from an Inkadinkado set called "Animal Hearts."

I was also hoping to make a bunch of mini cards to leave encouraging notes for my students, but I don't know that I'll have the time to do that.  I put this set (I have 5 sets in total) up in my Facebook store just for $2 with all proceeds going towards the chickens I have yet to get via World Vision! Determined to get the money sent before the new school year begins.

By the way, did you see my first ever watermark on the bottom right hand corner of the picture?  Howard designed it!  He was playing around with my logo for the past few days.  He split apart the logo he made for me into the roll and the heart.  I love it!

Crafting with Irene

Last Friday was a very different Friday than the one I just had tonight.  Tonight I watched the Pink by Design September release on Ustream!  Last Friday, I was nervous about Hurricane Irene as I was rushing to clean my room.  One of the things I did on Saturday as I continued to tidy up was say goodbye to my Cricut.  To the left, you can see my Cuttlebug.  And you can see that my Gypsy wire is always connected to my Cricut too!  I <3 my Gypsy!  And I'm totally going off topic here ...

I have an air conditioner somewhat close to my Expression, so I wanted it packed in the box so that there'd be no possibility of water damage or anything like that if those worst case scenarios in my head actually occurred.  The last time my E was in the box was when I brought it home!

The rain began coming down on Saturday.  It was like a regular rainy day.

However, the nighttime was a totally different story with the intense winds and the tornado watch.  I was awake from 3:30 to 6:30am before I finally fell back asleep.  Around 11am, I woke up and all seemed so calm outside except for a little bit of wind!  We had survived!  Phew!  Later that day around 5pm, the winds were really intense again, and we ended up losing power.  I was exhausted from the crazy early morning, so I ended up napping before dinner.  Silly me; I should have spent that time crafting when I still had daylight!  

After dinner, my family was supposed to watch a movie on the little DVD player that was charged, but we couldn't agree on anything that we all wanted to watch.  Haha, this is probably why we don't do the whole family movie night thing.  With nothing to do to occupy my time and no desire to sleep EXTREMELY early, I decided to craft ... in the dark!  I had a crank flashlight and a Sabbath candle (hehe, we're not Jewish).  In this picture, you can see just how dark it was!  No one had any lights at all.  The red you see there is from an emergency vehicle that was just driving around the neighborhood.  I took the opportunity to take the picture so that you could see the contrast.  It was especially odd for me because there's a street lamp that shines into my window because I'm at the front of the house on the top floor.  Strange!

Well, I decided to challenge myself and see if I could make a card in the dark.  I was excited to have something to do!  I couldn't craft at my little table though because I recently brought up the breakfast tray for crafting, and I had it set on top of my table so it'd be off the floor during the storm.  I didn't want to deal with that so I actually crafted on the low table since my Cricut wasn't there.  It was also easier to sit on the floor too and have much more room around me. 

Obviously I could only stamp, and I wasn't about to deal with my Stamp-a-ma-jig in the dark since I often had to hold the flashlight in one hand to see, so I chose a clear stamp.  I bought this Inkadinkado set just a week or so prior to the storm when AC Moore had their 50% off ALL clear and wood mounted stamps (I purchased a TON!).  I went with the little chocolate covered strawberry!

I then chose to use Pink by Design's "Big Thoughts" set since I figured it'd be a lot easier to stamp than thinner text.  I wanted a longer word because I knew I wanted to stamp 3 strawberries.  Once my stamp was chosen, I put it on my block and pulled out Memento ink.  I just gotta say just how wonder Memento is!  I read reviews before buying ink, and many suggested Memento and StazOn.  I had been using StazOn all this time but needed Memento for Copics.  I love both of them, and they both work better with certain stamps, but I really am happy that I can use a black ink sometimes and not have to worry about getting high on fumes, haha.

I chose "CELEBRATE" because who doesn't love celebrating birthdays, wedding, anniversaries, and days ending with "y" with chocolate covered strawberries?

Then I stamped those 3 strawberries.  One for me, two for you.  I mean, two for me, one for you.  I mean, three for me.  Haha.  In actuality, I don't like ALL chocolate covered strawberries.  They're not all created equally.  Sometimes the chocolate just doesn't meld well with the fruit.  Ooo, chocolate covered pineapple, on the other hand, is just absolute yum!

I colored the strawberries in with Bic Mark-It markers in ultra-fine because I was not about to deal with Copics bleeding all over the place.  Plus, these were small, and I wanted to have more control over it.  You can also see the candle in this picture.  It didn't stay lit for long because I kept wanting to leave my room, and as we all know, we're not to leave candles unattended!

The card needed something more, so I used my Martha Stewart Ribbon Loop punch.  I initially wanted the strips to go vertically, but in my trimming, I used the wrong measurement!  Whoops!  I wasn't about to dig for another paper in my scrap stash, so I just trimmed it to fit the top and bottom.

Here's the completed card!  It's not as fancy as other cards, but at the same time, I really do like CAS (clean and simple) cards so maybe it kind of sort of is!  The blackout gave me a reason to stick to my favorite CAS.

I lied.  I wasn't done.  It still needed something else, so I decided to put Glossy Accents on the chocolate part the next day in the light.  Then I thought, "I can't say I did all of it during a blackout with a flashlight," so I pulled out that lovely glossy stuff and applied by flashlight!  Silly me shook the bottle before I remembered that you're not supposed to shake it because of bubbles!  I had one small bubble, but I was able to pop it.

I still had time before heading to bed, so I put together another card.  I don't quite know why it won't rotate because I fixed it in Photobucket.  Oh, you can also see that I got tired of taking pictures of everything, so this is the final shot. Haha.  The stamp was from the same Inkadinkado set, and the sentiment is from Pink by Design's "Simply Everything," if I'm not mistaken.  I made the patterned paper with some Versamark ink and a stamp.  Don't you just love Versamark?  I didn't think I could make a tiny bow using the comb/fork method while it was that dark, so I just put the first piece of ribbon on and taped it to the back before taking another piece to tie a bow.

Alas, I STILL had some time to craft!  I decided to stamp these pieces of candy and the "EAT CANDY" phrase on 2.75x2.75" cardstock for 3x3 mini cards.  I colored them in quickly since I only did 5.  At this point, I was done.  I was happy with what I had done and thought it was quite the crafting adventure!

Special thanks goes to my pig rechargeable flashlight as seen in the picture above (the two lights come out of its snout).  I couldn't have done it without you!

Animal Mini Cards Set!

What a busy few weeks it has been!  My church had its annual coffeehouse on August 13th, so I was busy heading out to the city for rehearsals.  Even though it's been a while since the performance and the encore, I wasn't able to do much crafting because I was doing a lot of sleeping!  Here's a picture of one of the scenes from the musical that my cousin wrote.

I'm the one to the right of the girl speaking.  I'm wearing the dress with leggings and the scarf.  Basically, the musical was about "Peacekeepers" that have super powers to keep a city safe, but things were going downhill as talent stones (what we were wearing around our necks) were being stolen.  In this scene, we had just defeated a bunch of the "bad guys" and were questioning them.  My character was "Chief," so I was the leader of the group.  It was so much fun being able to serve with all of these people at my church even though I was pretty much one of the oldest!  Most of the those that were involved are in high school or just graduated high school.  I loved being able to get to know them.

By the way, our shirts were awesome.  They were designed by my fiance!  He's the one kneeling on the left side of this picture.  He's not actually wearing the shirt now because he was taking care of the sound board throughout the musical, and he didn't sing with us during the finale ("When You Believe" from Prince of Egypt).

Anyway, because of coffeehouse, I hadn't crafted in a while, but I was able to get back to it this week!  Yay! And I got back into it with full force because I made multiples.  And by multiples, I mean MULTIPLES!

I made this mini card set using Sandylion stamps along with Pink by Design's set "Scripted Year."  I kept the sentiments fairly simple so that they could be used for any occasion.  Each card is 3x3'' so it's a nice square size.  The white cardstock is cut at 2.75''.  Since some of the animals were smaller, I used a border punch to add something extra.  

The puppy one is, I think, my mom's favorite even though she doesn't like dogs, haha.  It is really cute though!  Initially, I had this puppy all white, and I only colored in the spots.  However, I tried one out with a lighter brown, and I liked it more as a whole especially as compared to the other cards.

For this sheep, I actually have 2 of them that are different shades of pink because I was testing colors.  I forgot to stamp the sheep in Memento and instead used StazOn.  I had to be very careful not to get everything to bleed.

This mouse one might be my favorite but that could be because I really like the purple as the cardstock color.  I was going to add a piece of cheese in its hand, but I don't know that it would've gone with the sentiment, haha.  

This monkey reminded me why I'm so glad I bought a bunch of different shades of brown when I purchased a few Copics.  I remember the days when all I had was the brown in the Crayola marker set!  It helps to have different shades!

The last one that I did was this little bird.  Thankfully, at this point, I used Memento to stamp, so I had no problems coloring this little guy!

I made 15 of each card and will be selling them as a set of 5.  That means I have 15 sets to sell!  I posted 10 in the store (I don't think all will sell, but I did already sell 2 sets!), and I think I'll be saving the other 5 for my church's bake sale in November.  All proceeds go to the mission fund, and by then, I think I'll have a lot more mini card sets to sell!  I'm so glad to be back into crafting mode!  If only I had a clean room to work in ... maybe I should tidy up today considering the rain that's on its way!  I was going to go to Michaels to pick up Copics with the 45% off coupon as well as some more Recollections paper, but I'd rather not go out in the rain.  Rainy days just seem perfect for staying inside and crafting!

My First Mini Card

I want to make cards every single day, but there are days that I just don't want to deal with the hassle of figuring out how to lay everything down on a card.  However, making a mini card takes away the pressure of having such a huge blank "canvas" mainly because I can make the card the size of the image!  So that's what I've been doing for the past few days.  The first card that I made featured this cute robot from the Sandy Lion stamp set that I found on clearance months ago.  I love these cutesy images!  I colored him in with Copics and Bic Mark-Its.  I have to say that I LOVE Copics because of all the lighter colors and how easy it is to blend (although I do need the correct paper to do this), but I do very much appreciate my Ultra Fine Bics because I don't have to worry about the small parts.  In actuality, the only thing colored with Copics in terms of this robot is the lightest gray.

The layering was easy to figure out mainly because I had made a mini card like this for Howard a while ago, so I just looked at the picture I took of that one to duplicate for these.  It's also super easy to make multiples. I made 8 of this one, and cutting 8 pieces of every color all at once really saves time.  No need to figure out size measurements for each card!  Figure it out once and cut cut cut!  Plus, even something like Corner Chomp-ing takes less time when I do a bunch at once because I keep the tool in a drawer, so I can just chomp it all at once and put it back.

The sentiment is from Pink by Design's "Be Mine" set.  When I first saw the sentiment, I immediately thought about squirrels, but I like that it works with nuts and bolts kinda stuff too.  I initially was going to sell them for a lot less in my FB store, but mini cards still take the same amount of time as a regular-sized card!  Haha, it's just easier working with smaller pieces in terms of cutting (I can use my small Cutterpede, haha yay!).  I really liked holding all 8 in my hands afterwards though ... it's fun to be able to get a lot done by making multiples!