Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Coming Soon! A Christmas in July Celebration!



Join us every weekend in July for a new Christmas in July project. Click on the link at the side of my blog for more details!

Monday, June 24, 2013

Fairy Splendor with Tiddly Inks

Hi Friends and Fellow Crafters! This past weekend we celebrated my nephew's future baby girl with a fun Baby Shower. Along with the owls, I made two pictures using Fairy Sunny Day and Fairy Happy Day from Tiddly Inks for the baby's nursery. I have been practicing coloring with my copics and I have learned some great coloring techniques from Alyce at Kit and Clowder and from her You Tube Channel. Talk about talented! I have been a  follower for awhile, but only recently had the nerve to attempt her coloring techniques. Here are my pictures.


I love Tiddly Inks. The images are so sweet and just perfect for a baby's room. I used most of the same colors that Alyce recommends on her Copic Speed Coloring Technique video for my pictures. I changed a few colors around just to keep it personal, and I used a distress ink cloud technique for the background. I learned it from a tag swap we are doing at the Circut Circle. The video can be found here if you are interested. It is very simple, I used a cloud formation cut that I found on Paper Pups. I cut it with the Cricut Craft Room and my Mini.  I placed it against my image and just sponged some color on my paper working upward from the cloud stencil I created.  It looks really nice on the picture.
 
I started by printing out a 4.5 x 6.5 copy of my digi stamps on to Papertrey Ink White Cardstock. I like the basic white cardstock because it holds the color nicely and doesn't bleed. I did the skin first using E000, E00, E11, E21, E04, and R20. I colored their hair with E13, E15, E18, and then I used E29 for the darkest parts. I tried to make the dresses similar to the way Alyce made the dress on her tutorial, but I couldn't quite get the folds. I did ok with mine. I used BG000, BG13, BG49 and I also added in BG01. I blended with BG0000. I lost track of all the colors I used on the mushroom. I started with Y35, Y38, E15, E18, then I added YR31, YR68, and YR000 to blend the colors. I
used E40, E41, E42, E43, E44 and E47 on the stump and dots. I followed the colors Alyce used for the purples. They were V000, V01, V04, V06 and V09. I also used them for the shoes. I used many of the same Y colors for the flowers. I also used RV000, RV02 and RV04 for the flower in her hair. The grass was done in G21, YG03, G94, G99 and a couple of greens that I can't remember. LOL!
 



I used a mixture of the V's and BG's for the wings, I tried to do them similar to the way the Alyce did them on the video. Mine turned out different, but still pretty.  Once the fairies were done, I added the sky to the background. I also used stickles on a couple of flowers and the wings. I just couldn't resist!
 
Here is Fairy Sunny Day. She was done with the same colors as Fairy Happy Day.
 
 
 
I picked up the frames in Michaels. They fit so nicely in them. I am really proud of these. I owe a big thanks to Alyce at Kit and Clowder for the tutorial and inspiration.

I still have a couple more Fairy Digi's to make for my Great Niece's nursery. I hope to have them done in a couple of weeks. Here is one more look at my beautiful little fairies.




Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today!
 
Happy Crafting!
Colleen



















Friday, June 21, 2013

You're A Hoot!

Hi friends and fellow crafters! I am the guest designer today at the Cricut FANatics blog, and I thought I would share my post here too.

 I am going to be a Great Aunt in August and I am beyond thrilled about this baby. Even more exciting is that we will be welcoming a little girl into our family! This is a big deal because I have a son and my brother has 4 sons, so little girls are in short supply in our family. LOL!

The theme for the baby's nursery is forest animals, owls are the focus. I ordered the crib set and curtains that were on the baby's registry, but decided to make the wall art with my Cricut. There are many owls to choose from on the cartridges I own, but I wanted to make the art as close to the pictures from the registry as I could. The owls are from Taggies and this is what they look like.

So these owls were kind of expensive and that gave me the idea to fire up my Cricut and make my own version for the baby's room. I looked for a match to the background in the craft stores, but couldn't find any. A Circle member suggested that I use my Imagine to re-create the paper, and that is what I did. I actually used the CCR with my Imagine to make the paper. I used Creative Memories Holiday Tags and Frames for the circles and colored them with colors from Wrap It Up. It turned out great!


I chose the owl from Create A Critter for my owls. I wanted my owls to look as close to the Taggies owls, so I used the hide contour in the CCR and hid the markings on the owl's belly. I replaced them with flowers from Art Philosophy and Create A Critter. I also hid the sleepy eyes and replaced them with the flower from the Zebra layer on Create A Critter. I cut 2 extra white shadows of the owl and trimmed away most of the owl so that I would have white eyes. After I did that, I realized I could have just cut two pieces of white scrap paper and got the same result. LOL! I also cut an extra blue top layer and a pale green shadow layer. I cut away the body from the blue layer and the head from the pale green layer. Here is how the blue layer looked trimmed. In my haste to piece the owl together, I forgot to take a picture of the light green section.
 

I layered them over the bright pink shadow and added the eyes, feet and beak. Then I went to work on the branch. I found a branch I liked on Wall Décor and More. It comes from the owl cut on that cartridge. I cut the leaves away and added hearts that I cut from Doodle Charms. I inked the hearts and branches with Stampin' Up inks.

 
I got a couple of frames in Michaels to frame my owls. They are shadow box frames, but they give you an option of how far back you would like to place your art. Since the picture was flat, I used all three spacers that came with the frame. Here are my owls.
 


 
The pictures didn't come out very good. I think I should have taken a couple before I framed them. Here are a couple of close ups of the owls.
 

 
I really hope that the baby enjoys the owls from Aunt Colleen. It was so much fun making all the baby things for the Baby Shower today. I will be posting more of my baby room décor that I created, plus a card and tags later this week. Thanks for stopping by my blog today!
 
Happy Crafting!
Colleen
 
 
Designed By: Colleen McCauley
Designed With CCR 
Machine Used: Cricut Expression AE2 and Imagine
Carts: Wall Décor and More, Doodlecharms, Art Philosophy, Create A Critter.
Imagine Carts: Wrap It Up for Circle Colors and Creative Memories Holiday Tags and Frames for Circles.
Extras: Stampin' Up Inks and Adhesives.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Cricut Circle Cartridge Challenge Project




Hi friends and fellow crafters! These past few weeks have been so busy a round here. I hope everyone is doing fine where you are. My prayers and thoughts are with all in the Midwest affected by those horrible tornadoes and flooding.

We have been doing a monthly challenge on the Cricut boards using the Circle Cartridges. I originally was using Animal Antics, I really like that cartridge very much. The challenge is supposed to run for 12 months but many of the participants needed a change from their carts, so we switched things around a bit. I ended up taking Letter Envy for my cartridge. I will be posting a project a month for the next three months. This is going to be more challenging than I originally thought. Some of the layers on the fonts are very thin, this is fine with larger cuts, but my title letters were cut around an inch and a half. A couple of the letters are pieced and re-pieced together, LOL!

I created a layout about the past 3 weeks. Spike, my youngest fur baby accidentally got out of house on May 14th. For almost 2 weeks, we were looking for him. So our days went something like this: Get up, get Danny off to his program, get my Mom up, get her situated, wait for the hospice aid, go out looking for Spike, come back, make lunch, hang with my Mom until Danny comes home, wait for Pete, when Pete gets home, go looking for Spike, have dinner, go looking for Spike, get Mom ready for bed, pass out and repeat the next day. It was exhausting. I made flyers, I searched in the rain, I spread cat litter in the forest by our house and left little trails of it leading back home to us. I learned a few things over those 2 weeks. I discovered we have forest by our house! I learned that I can print over 100 pictures using my ink refills. I found out that I should have my eyes checked because I chased a raccoon one dark rainy night for almost a half hour thinking it was Spike. The most important lesson I learned is that there are many caring people out there. My neighbors helped me search for Spike, good people called saying they thought they spotted him, people shared his picture on Facebook. All this for one little cat. It's a beautiful thing. Last Sunday, my Mom got up early, around 6:00AM insisting she needed to use the commode. She has basically been bed ridden since mid March after breaking her hip in February and then having a heart attack the night before she was due to be discharged from rehab in March. It was an odd request, but I got her up and put her on the commode. She ended up doing nothing. Sooo, I lifted her back into bed and swung her glass door open, (thank you hot flashes!)  and heard a tiny meow. There was Spike on the back deck! I was so shocked, I didn't believe what I was seeing at first. After I smothered him with love, I snapped the picture on the layout using my cell phone. He was much thinner, but in overall good health. Sadly, the same couldn't be said for my sweet Patches.

Patches was my oldest fur baby. She was almost 17 years old. She was a little street cat from Bayonne, that would play with me when I would park my car. It was barely a year after my Dad's death and I was still mourning, plus for other reasons too long to get into here, from that September through Christmas, it was a very rough time in our lives. She would make me smile whenever I saw her. On Christmas Day, I went to the neighbor's house that she would always be around and asked if I could adopt her. They were happy for her to get off the streets and I was happy for her companionship. She was my comfort giver cat.  She had been doing more sleeping than anything over the past few months, and I suspected her life was winding down. Last week, I noticed she had what looked like an infected tooth. I took her to the vet and they started her on antibiotics. She kept getting worse with each day and on Wednesday, I knew for sure that she was dying. She was barely walking and eating and only drinking some water. I called the vet and we decided to let her stay here and die at home if that was possible. Thursday night, I was sleeping on the couch, and she somehow crawled from the ottoman she was laying on to lay next to me. She always slept by me so it was one last gift of comfort from Patches to me. On Friday, I knew I had to return the favor. I needed to bring her to the vet, I felt like she needed help to leave me. It was a very peaceful end to a special cat's life. I stayed with her and she didn't fight the vet's help.  The picture I used for the layout was a favorite of mine. I took it when we were out in the backyard in the summer of 2009. I used to have it as my avatar for message boards.

Now that you know the story behind this layout, here are the crafty details. I used Letter Envy for the title, Meow for the paw prints, Rock Princess for the hearts and the broken hearts, and Pet Shop for the cats. I colored the cats using copic markers. Everything is from my stash. The papers are a mixture of October Afternoon and Pink Paislee. I also used some Washi Tape and two chipboard boarders from Deja Views on the top and bottom of the page. The journaling was done on my computer. I used the Cricut Craft Room to create this layout.



At first, I wanted to add more to the layout, but the very busy lettering, made me decide to kept it simple.


Thanks for stopping by my blog today!
 
Happy Crafting!
Colleen