SugarShine Designs

Happy Mother's Day

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Happy Mother's Day to everyone out there on this beautiful Sunday! I've had a great day so far. My family has treated me very well and I'm looking forward to a family walk in a nature area nearby and dinner out before the day is over. I hope you're day is going equally as well.

Today I'm sharing a Mother's Day card of course! This is one I sent to my own Mom. I wanted to try a card where a cut is only partial and it allows the card to have a 3D effect without a lot of complicated work.

After searching a bit, this dragonfly caught my eye in the Cricut Dimensional Paper cartridge which is part of the Cricut Access subscription for the Cricut Explore. For some reason, I've always been drawn to dragonflies and this one was no exception. Here's an angled view of the card so you can see the 3D aspect a little more.

And here's the interior of the card where some of the leftover paper from the front is used to create a border on the top and bottom of the card. The Happy Mother's Day message is stamped in the card with Tuxedo Black Memento ink.

I've been seeing a lot of heat embossed sentiments on cards from various manufacturer's and crafters. I like it and have been trying my hand at it. So far, I'm not that thrilled with the results. First, it was really hard to get the ink pad I needed which everyone says is the best - VersaMark. I tried Michael's and JoAnn's numerous times and it was always sold out. I did finally find one but for this card, I made due with some regular ink. Unfortunately, regular ink is not as sticky as VersaMark so the embossing powder didn't stick evenly on the Love Ya Mom stamped message. The result was a little spotty but it worked ok. I'm going to continue trying this technique until I get it down! Practice makes perfect right? Anyway, the sentiment shape was another nested shape in the Cricut Access subscription. I believe it was in the Elegant Edges cartridge.

Well that's it from me today. Have a wonderful Mother's Day and see you soon! There will be several posts coming this week in honor of National Scrapbooking week.

Janet

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Happy Birthday Flowers

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Hi everyone. Today I'm sharing a birthday card that I made for my awesome and wonderful Assistant at the office. She is always so bright and chipper that I had to make a card to match her personality!

Except for the three flowers, this card was made entirely with cuts from the Cricut Access subscription. The main flower accent is a Print Then Cut design with a blank banner. One of my fonts were used to add Happy Birthday as the sentiment. A card sketch helped me put this together. A card sketch is so helpful to get the creativity flowing and it really speeds things up too. Here's what the card sketch looked like. I copied pretty closely except I used an oval instead of a circle for the main part of the card.

Click to visit the Paper Play Sketches Challenge Blog

There are a lot of patterns on this card - five in total plus two different solid card stock colors on a space that's 4 1/4" x 5 1/2"! That might be a record on a card for me but it works. The colors are the same brightness and nothing is fighting each other. The easiest way to use a lot of patterns together is to use papers from the same card stack - almost anything will work together when you do that because the designer usually designs the collection to work together. These papers came from a variety of collections because I pulled pieces from my stash of scraps. That took more time and effort though.

The final touches that make this card extra special are sequins in the right corner and the three cheery flowers. I applied the white Perler Pen to cover the sequin holes and create flower centers. Last but not least, I applied Glossy Accents to the center flower with the lines and clear Wink of Stella to add some glimmer to the flowers and leaves. It's hard to see but you can see the application of white Perler Pen to create the Prima flower centers, the glitter accents from the Wink of Stella pen and the Glossy accents on the center blue star flower in this close-up.