Cooking with Cricut BLOG-AVERSARY

Welcome to Paper Crafting World and Cooking With Cricut's 2nd Blog-Aversary and our week long celebration! Each day for a whole week (May 19-26) we will be brining you fabulous projects made by our Design Team members. We have some GREAT blog candy as well as some daily file and graphic give-aways -- so you will definitely want to make PCW-CWC your daily stop every day this week!

Our theme for today is . . . Crowns/Tiaras and this is what I created!

My husband and I are very proudly raising little nerds. My seven year old is a self-proclaimed bookworm and loves everything about the local library. She has been begging for library cards for her own books.

I used Once Upon a Princess and my Gypsy for all the cuts.

For the pink envelope I cut the tag and rather than using it as a tag I scored the edges, folded and glued.

Cut at 2.25" then embossed on  big kick

Scored the sides and bottom

Crown cut on Gypsy with width 2" and height 1.5" (not original proportions).
I also had to hide the contour lines so they weren't cut.
Words printed in size 12 and 14 font. Font name: "KG Ray of Sunshine"

Rectangle cut with paper trimmer 2.25" x 3.5"
Crown cut 1" height (used gypsy to line them up where I wanted them)
Small pink oval cut and glued to back of card behind the crown.

Thanks for stopping by and make sure you head on over to Cooking With Cricut to check out the rest of the projects by our amazing Design Teams!

Once Upon a Princess Cartridge Showcase

Once Upon a Princess

I am so excited to be doing my first cartridge showcase for cooking with cricut. I opted to do one of my favorite cartridges, Once Upon a Princess (only with a fun twist!).

Anyone who makes projects for little girls can see what a GREAT cartridge this is: fairies, butterflies, beautiful dresses, cupcakes etc; What isn't to love?? Well, if you ask my son there is a lot not to love about it! He's 4 and always complains that I don't have a cricut cartridge for a prince too. So, this showcase I opted to use the princess cartridge to make projects for my little prince!

First is a castle. The minute he saw it his jaw dropped and he said "way cool mom!"

I used Coredinations paper and embossed it in stone with my big kick. After embossing it I sanded each piece to reveal the brown and gray colors below (seriously, this Coredinations paper is the coolest stuff ever, perfect for a project like this, for sure!) My son said "wow, how'd you do that??". 

I have made the castle before, and the last time I made it it was a lot bigger. I will say, the bigger you make it the easier it is to assemble, however this smaller castle is much more sturdy and he is able to use little lego guys to play in it and it is holding up pretty well even after a couple of weeks.

I am entering the castle into the Throwback Thursday challenge at My Creative Time.

The next project I made was crowns: one for him and one for his teddy bear.

 The crown cuts in two pieces which connect together by slipping the front piece into the slots on the back piece (this way you can adjust for your child's head size). I made each piece 12 inches long for my son and 7 inches for the teddy bear.

My last project is to show one of my favorite cuts on Once Upon a Princess - you could use it for any party. It's a generic card that has "You're Invited" cut on the outer edge.

I made this invite for a Magic Show themed birthday party. I used my gypsy and added the oval cut out on the front of the card (each page of this cartridge has a "gem" feature and there are several cute shapes that would work as cutouts like this.)  The sentiment "Magical" is also from Once Upon a Princess (it had a fairy wand on the end of the word, which I simply cut off for use on this card to make it more boy-ish).

I am entering this card into the Children's Card Challenge at Cuttlebug Spot and 

in the birthday card challenge at My Sheri Crafts.

The bunny and top hat are cut from Create a Critter (top hat is an accessory and I just flipped it over). I accordion folded some paper on the bottom of the card and used foam squares to affix "magical" to it.

I have used this cartridge for lots of other (more girly) things - see the links on the side of my blog and it should pull up everything else I have used this cartridge for! It has a very sweet font, tons of tags and lots of little girly images. I hope you enjoyed my projects and have inspired you to create for you little princes, too!

Mini Princess Dress Cards

We made an art kit for my daughters friend and she wanted me to make some "princess cards" to put in it. I don't own any Disney cartridges so I had to put on my thinking cap! I pulled out Once Upon a Princess and realized that a lot of the dresses could be altered to look like the Disney Princesses' gowns. It's amazing what merely changing the colors of things alters how they look!

I have now realized that I gave them away before I took photos of them other than these few. I had to take bits and pieces of different dresses and hide some aspects and weld other aspects together on the gypsy. (Snow whites red stripes I think were supposed to be shoes, lol)!

All in all they turned out to be very sweet little note cards that the girls adored!

Baby Bath Gift Set

To go along with the crab card I made for my last post this is the gift. I got the idea off of pinterest (of course!) I took a frappucino box and covered it in coordinating papers. I had some sticky-backed ribbon that applied over the top and edges to make it look more finished. I put two hooded towels, baby body wash, and a bottle of bubbles inside.

All the cuts are from my cricut. The sides have a crab border from Life's a Beach placed over an embossed pink layer. (I was annoyed with myself when I realized I forgot to emboss the brown paper before adhering it to the frappucino box, but decided pulling it off and trying to fix it would probably only make matters worse!)

The front and back have cuts from Once Upon a Princess. That cartridge has an adorable little mermaid on it that I have been waiting to use,  and this was the perfect occassion!

 The eyes of the mermaid are cut out. You can cut cheeks and lips in pink to glue on, however I opted to draw a nose and mouth (this is just further proof to me that I NEED some peechy keen face stamps, haha!)

If you have a crab put it in water!

The best parenting advice I have ever gotten: "If you have a crab put it in the water". It has worked from the time my kids were just a month old and still works now that they are almost 5 and 7. It's the inspiration for a baby card I put together today. The gift will be some bath products.

The card is the square crab card from Life's a Beach. I embossed the paper with my Big Kick and added some twine and buttons. The way the card is intended the background paper wouldn't be there and the inside of the back would show through. But, I wanted to add a sentiment to the inside of the card so I glued a background paper on (which is actually a really sweet pink argyle, it just doesn't show up so well here).

The sentiment I had wrote and cut "crab" and "water" using the Once Upon a Princess font (welded letters together on my Gypsy).

I'm entering this project into a couple of challenges:
Alphabet Challenge Blog: Dry Embossing
Card Makin' Mamas: Buttons

Once Upon a Princess 3D Castle tutorial

I have been eyeing the castle on the Once Upon a Princess cartridge for quite some time, but it has looked so overly involved I was scared of it. It REALLY was not that bad. The hardest part was figuring out which cut was which part of the castle so I could make sure I had the right color paper for the right cut. Once I figured that out it was not difficult...just time consuming. Once all the cuts were done it took me about an hour to fold/glue/assemble completely.

This is a very "bare bones" version. Nothing extra at all 

(it was my practice before making a very gorgeous pink one, lol).  

I figured I would post  some tips/suggestions I figured out in case others wanted to try making one.

First, I don't know how I would have done this as smoothly and as quickly as I did without my Martha Stewart scoring board. It was a life saver. If you don't have one, take your 40% off an item coupon to Micheal's and get one. I love mine! You have to score each column several times but more importantly, you have to score each roof and the lines would be a bit difficult to fold without scoring I think.

Here are images of my cartridge book with what each piece is written in.

The lower image is the white towers on my castle. 

The shifted image is the very light gray (almost white) wall that completely surrounds the tall white towers.

Sorry this one is a bit blurry. This is the layer on page 65. 

The base layer has two parts:

    The top is the piece that holds the two tall white towers in place. 

         (It is essentially the floor inside that little inner fort that you cut.)

    The bottom is the two outer side walls.

Shift on this layer is going to be the floor that surrounds the little fort (lies between the outside walls and the inner fort). **The little crown looking things on the outside of the castle are actually the tabs from this floor. They pass through a slit in the walls, fold up and glue. So, when choosing the color for the floor make it the color you want those little pieces to be on the outside of your castle.

This is the next page (76). The base image is the front wall and the back wall. The image does not show the arch door, but, the top cut is the front of the castle and the door will cut even though it is not shown.

This is Shift Layer on page 76. This will be all the roof pieces. The top two are for the inner/tall towers. The bottom four are for the four corners (Important if you are going to make them different colors :)

I used my Gypsy to make this. I used a height of "11" as the standard measurement. It took 11 layers/pieces of paper to cut. I have read online people saying the biggest you can make it using the cricut dial is to set the dial at 8.5 inches (that is how I'll do my next one so I can emboss the walls etc; afterwards. I wanted a big castle, but the pieces were too big to emboss).

Hopefully this is helpful to anyone thinking of trying the castle. It's super cute now that it's finished and I love that I can make it not so girly and my son loves it as much as my daughter!

Birthday Invitation Re-Do

So, I made what I thought were super-cute invitations for my daughter's 6th birthday party. However, now that I have played with the cricut and, as she said, gotten much better at it, she wanted me to make some new ones. So these are the invitations to her tea party. She did offer me some comfort and told me the others weren't "a total waste because it's always good to get practice".

This is from Once Upon a Princess. The paper was from TJ Maxx for 2.99 for a huge pack and the ribbon was on clearance at Wal-Mart.