Happy Birthday Michael!

Today is my nephew Michael's 15th Birthday! This kid is a sports phenom! Great at Baseball, Bowling and a Super Star in Hockey, inline AND ice! I've had a great time traveling to many places to watch him play.





Today's project is for Michael. It's tough to actually buy a 15 year old anything, so a gift card is usually the safest bet. I wanted something a little cooler than just a card with a giftcard inside, so I found this cool latticed giftcard box on the Silhouette Studio website. Nothing frustrates me more, than not having what I need instantly, so I'm loving the fact that I can order what I need online and use it immediately! I must admit, I've been a bit addicted to "shopping" for cutfiles in the Silhouette store.



The Gift Box is a Silhouette Cutfile. I used the team colors of Teal, White, Black and Grey for his favorite Hockey team, the San Jose Sharks. The Power Play is cut from the Cricut All Sport cartridge and the crossed hockey sticks were pixel traced from a JPEG in MTC.



I cut the sentiment out in Silhouette Studio using the Wide Latin Font.

I'm sad that I'm not able to spend his actual Birthday with him, but I'm thankful for all the years that I did! I love you, Michael. Happy Birthday!



Thanks for stopping by.....

Pirate's Cove

Every Halloween, our cul-de-sac transforms into Pirate's Cove!! Hundreds of neighborhood kids come to our court to watch the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman
battle it out. Last year, we had over 1200 trick-or-treaters. It's truly a labor of love and it inspired this project.




I started by printing out 2 parchment pages from the Buccaneer cart. I cut around the edges of the paper to give the appearance of a treasure map. I backed both on plain 12x12 black cardstock. All of the paper and embellishments were printed and cut from Buccaneer on my Imagine.

The font used in the Pirate's Cove title were cut from Blackletter at 2 1/4 inches and shadowed on my E2.




The flags were cut at 4.5" the 2nd flag was flipped.
Crow's nest was cut at 4.5"
Skeleton Pirate was cut at 4.8"
The "X " was cut at 3"
Ghost Ship was cut at 4.3"
Crab was cut at 2"





All of the embellishments were popped up, using pop dots. I finished the pages off with random dotted lines that I drew freehand with a black, fine point Sharpie from
the ship to the X on the opposite page.

School Days

I'm SO excited to be involved in the Cricut FANatic design team! My designs will be on the blog the 7th of every month. There are some really talented people involved, so make sure to check out the blog daily!

This month, the theme is End of Summer/Back to School. Here's my contribution....



The inspiration for this project came from the Graphic 45 paper collection An ABC Primer. The canvas is 7 gypsies Artist Tray.




I started this project by cutting 2 3/4" x 3 3/4" rectangles and inking them with Tim Holtz Distress Ink Pad in Walnut Stain. I then edged the tray in the alphabet that I cut from a piece of the collection, I just trimmed the middle out of the paper. I glued each rectangle into each cubby with Aleene's Tacky Glue. You need a good tacky adhesive (this I learned the hard way....)



All of the cuts were cut on my Expression, from A Child's Year and TBBM. The silhouettes on the Child's Year cart are some of my favorites! The chalkboard silhouette, apple and tag (TBBM) were cut at 3", the reading girl and "READ" for the tag were cut at 1 1/2". The other embellishments were cut from the papers in the collection.



With Kenji graduating from College this past July, this is the first September that I haven't had to deal with Back to School in 17 years! This project brought back so may school days memories... So ends a big chapter in Kenji's life and starts his next big adventure!

Thanks for looking!

Butterfly Lever Card

I'm currently vacationing back in CA for the Summer, so my opportunities for crafting will be few and far between. Today is my bestie's 50th Birthday, so this is the card that I made for Rhonda. It was cut in MTC from a file from SVGcuts.com. The paper is from a DCWV paper stack, unfortunately after hours of scouring the internet, I couldn't find which one it's from. If you can use double sided paper for the card bases, it makes the job a lot easier!

Hockey Cake

When my Nephew called and asked me to make him a cake for his 13th Birthday, I should've thought twice when I told him, "Anything you want"...... Now, both of my Nephew's are HUGE hockey fans, but Jeremy seems to be a bit torn between his favorite NHL teams. So when he told me, "I want a Boston Bruins and San Jose Sharks cake with the Stanley Cup and Rings that look like Super Hero rings, but with the team emblems on them..." I knew I was in trouble. HOW was I going to incorporate both teams on 1 cake without it looking totally tacky???? Well, here's my attempt.....

I attempted to make each layer resemble hockey pucks, so I covered them with Black Fondant. I have fallen in LOVE with Duff's Fondant. Not only is it easier to work with than Wilton's, the colors are more vibrant and it actually tastes decent. I also used the fondant to stripe the cakes. I designed the Bruins emblem on MTC and cut it out of Wilton's gumpaste. Tried to use Duff's gumpaste and ended up throwing it in the trash. The Sharks emblem proved too difficult to cut, so I just spelled out Sharks and cut them from the Cricut Varsity Letter cartridge. Luckily, I found a Stanley Cup SVG and cut it using MTC out of gumpaste. I cut two images, put lollipop sticks between the two, glued them together with liquified gumpaste and painted them with Silver Pearl Dust. After transporting to the Ice Rink for the party, I placed the Stanley Cup atop the cake and added some cake charms that I hung stars that I cut from gumpaste. Jeremy was thrilled with the cake....

Bruiser's Soccer Treats

It's been forever since I've posted and unfortunately almost as long since I've crafted. It seems now, the only time I can get my creativity on is when a friend or family member has a project for me to help with. This past weekend, I helped my neighbor and good friend Margie, with an end of season treat for her Daughter's soccer team. I received a Babycakes cake pop maker from a crafting friend (thanks Amy!), so my neighbor and I had ours working side by side and we turned out over 50 cake pops!

Wait, that sounded way easier than it actually was. Through trial and error, we probably made over 100 pops (some didn't even make them properly out of the pop maker), of those, 56 made it into the buckets. Luckily our Husbands were willing guinea pigs and welcoming recipients of the "rejects". First we needed a recipe for the balls. We had read that the denser the cake, the better the pop, so we went with our tried and true White Almond Sour Cream Cake recipe. Our first tip with using the pop maker. Don't use Crisco to grease the pop maker, spray with Pam! We wasted 2 batches until we figured that out! We used a pastry bag with a Wilton's 2D tip to fill the pop maker.

We fully filled the bottom cavity. This will create the roundest pop (you'll have some that will come out looking like Saturn, but don't fret. Once you dip it in chocolate, you won't see the ring. If you're really worried about the ring, you can break it off pretty easily.)

We found that baking them for 5 minutes was the perfect time. You'll have to experiment with times based on your maker and the recipe used. When they are done baking you need to put them in the freezer until they are ready to be dipped. Our first batch, we used chocolate morsels thinned with Crisco and a crock pot. We found the chocolate to cake ratio to be too heavy on the chocolate side (according to Hubby, though. you can never have too much chocolate!). So those hit the reject pile. We weren't too keen on the taste of the Candy Melts but we gave in and found that they worked the best. Make sure you melt the chips in a vessel deep enough to fully submerge the pop into the chocolate. Again, through trial and error, we found the best method for dipping is to first dip your lollipop stick in the candy melt and immediately poke it into the pop. Fully submerge your pop in the chocolate making sure to coat a small portion of the stick to ensure that your pop stays put! Next, you're going to swirl and tap your pop to get rid of the excess chocolate and ensure a nice round shape. Immediately dip or sprinkle your pop with colored sugars on nonpareil's and let dry on a cake pop stand or we used a piece of styrofoam covered in aluminum foil.

My friend bought the galvanized buckets in the Dollar section of our local Target. We decorated them with vinyl diecuts that we cut on the Cricut. The soccer ball is from Sports Mania cut at 2 inches. The font is Don Juan cut at 1 1/2 inches.

Once the pops are dry (we waited about 30 minutes) we wrapped them in Wilton's Pop Favor Bags. We took the styrofoam circles that we used to dry the pops on and cut them to fit snugly into the bottom of each pail. We carefully pushed the pops into the styrofoam and filled the buckets with green shredded paper and added chocolate soccer balls that were purchased from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

Here's the finished project! I hear the girls were thrilled with their treats....it made it worth all of the hard work! GO BRUISER'S!!!!!

Greetings from Bikini Bottom

Don't let it be said that I won't rise to a challenge........with that being said, I also am notorious for biting off far more than I can chew! Cricutmachine.com was running a Black Friday special (have I mentioned that I'm a sucker for a good Black Friday special?)and they were selling the Cricut Cake for $49.95. My intention was to make this a fabulous Christmas gift to a well deserving friend, but another good friend, and an incredible enabler, pointed out that this could be the gift that kept on giving......so I kept it! Not only did I keep it, but upon receiving it, I committed to make the cake for a friends upcoming Baby Shower. Sooooooooo.....8 weeks, 15 Spongebob episodes, 100 youtube video tutorial hours, 10 trips to JoAnn's, Michael's and Hobby Lobby and 6 trials in my test kitchen later. This is my very first cake!

Now, I really hadn't given much thought to the cake itself. I figured all I needed was to pick a flavor. Boy was I wrong. My first cake was just out of the box. It literally crumbled apart when I attempted to level it. So it was back to the internet (and some more tutorials) where I found designmeacake.com. I made her White Almond Sour Cream Cake and almost fell on the floor when I tasted it. Not only did it taste good, it cut like a dream. My first filling was the Wilton White Decorator Icing, I don't recommend it. It was FAR too sweet and really tasted greasy. So....back to the internet! I settled on a Nutella Buttercream Filling. Now that I had the cake set.....off to the work on the fun stuff, the decorations! The theme for the shower was Spongebob Squarepants, so I went to my Spongebob Cartridge and started planning the cuts that I'd be making on my new Cricut Cake!!!! 3 days before the shower, I started making my cake toppers. After watching a few episodes of the cartoon, I decided on an Island scene for the top of the cake. I used gumpaste to make the crab and gumpaste wrapped dowels to make the palm trees. The fronds were cut from the Cricut Life's a Beach cartridge.

The day before the shower I made the cakes, covered them with fondant and cut out all of my pieces on my Cricut Cake. I arrived a couple of hours before the party and put on the final touches.

The sand on the top is brown sugar and all the pieces were "glued" on with gumpaste dissolved in some water and applied with a paintbrush. The Mom-to-be seemed to be pleased with my cake. Just gave me the motivation to start planning my next one. Possibly something for Valentines Day???.......