Happy Bird Day Card

I really do love my Cricut Imagine machine.  It's a machine that not only prints out images at any size you choose, but it also cuts them out in detail.  Love it.

For Christmas, my lovely daughter gave me "Imagine More Cards" and this is a really neat cartridge!  It has some great papers (the machine also prints out paper in whatever size you choose up to 12x12).  It also has some card sayings and embellishments that are cute and funny. 

So, for her birthday, I made her a card.  I hope she likes it.

 I made the card at 5" high, so that it would fit onto the 12x12 paper.  I changed the right-side panel to match the left panel, because I didn't care for the green print that the original image had.  (love that you can change the layers!)  

I cut the "tweet tweet" image with the bird cage at 4" high, and cut all of the layers as well.   I used home-made dimensionals to layer them.

The inside panels of the card were cut using the same 3-panel gatefold card, again changing the right panel to blue print, cut at 4.8".  After this was printed, I cut the pieces apart and inked them before adhering to the inside of the card.

I think the sentiment "Happy Bird Day" was cut at 3" high.  Cute, huh? 

Thrifty Fun with String

I've seen a lot of cards and scrapbook pages that use baker's twine lately, so I figured I'd pick some up and try it on my projects.   I found some at Archiver's.  I was SHOCKED at the price!  It was $4 for a package of 3 colors, less than 9 yards of each color.  Seriously?  It's STRING for cryin' out loud!!

So, I set about to find some for a more reasonable cost.  I had some Sugar n Cream kitchen cotton, but it was a little too thick.  So, I separated the strands, and voila! 

 Here is my version next to the "fancy floss" from Archiver's:



Because there are 4 plies in the strand, you can create multiple color combinations.  For example, the reddish cotton has a ply of red, white, beige and yellow; so you could use red/white, red/beige, red/yellow, beige/white, beige/yellow or use two red, yellow or white  create your own combination.  Same for the blue/white/green cotton skein.  I used two plies for each of the samples that I made.

Oh - the best part?  The kitchen cotton is on sale at Michael's this week for $1 a ball.  Each ball has 95 yards, so the cost is about 1/2 a cent per 2 ply yard of "baker's twine."  The Archiver's twine cost 15 cents per yard.  I know you won't need almost 200 yards of baker's twine, so you can either share with friends or learn to crochet!!