Something a Little....

Different. :) I think that I'm going to start doing things a little differently on here. On Tuesdays, I believe that I'm going to TRY to have Tooty Fruity Tuesdays - a Toot-orial each Tuesday. The tutorials, for the foreseeable future, will be focused on SCAL and it's functions. I will start with basic ones and work on to a little more advanced things as I go. On this page, I also plan to begin putting the .jpg file of some of the cuts that I've made. The blog will not host 'files', but it will host pictures. If I put the .jpg on here, you can copy it and import it - easily - into SCAL for your own use.

Today, I'm featuring a peanut picture and an olive picture. I recently used both on some 6x6 recipe pages I was making for a swap.

The peanut as seen once cut by the Cricut ...


















And the original .jpg file. Once it was imported into SCAL, I used "Blackout" to get rid of all of the tiny holes. I needed a LOT of these little guys and didn't want to wait for the Bug to cut all of the tiny holes. I didn't really need those, anyway, as I used the Cuttlebug to emboss each peanut to add the texture.









The olive as seen when cut by the Cricut .....




















The original .jpg files.

The olive base.
















The olive layers (I elected not to use the highlighting stripe on my cut.).

















You should be able to click on each picture, right click on the big picture when it comes up, and save it on your computer. Save it in an easy place to remember (but I don't suggest your desktop!!) so that you can find it when you go to import it into SCAL. :)




I will go over the method of importing later in a Tooty Fruity Tuesday Tutorial. Next Tuesday, look for an overview of a lot of the basic features of SCAL.


Hopefully, this will be useful to some of you - and even a reminder of some of the cool things that SCAL does for those of you who have used SCAL for a while.

Let me know what you think and what you'd like a Tooty Fruity Tuesday to focus on!


Have an awesome Tuesday and a great, big, beautiful tomorrow!!



~*Shell*~

Castle Banner

A friend was having a birthday party for her daughter. It was, of course, a princess party. :) :) I was asked to make a banner for the 'castle' entrance. Cutting the letters with the Cricut was an obvious choice, right?


The letters were cut at about 6 inches each and the font used was Black Chancery. The 12x24 paper by Cricut/Provo Craft was used for this project.

Once the letters were cut, I had a quandary : How do I hang these suckers up?!

The pennants were easy. Each one had 2 holes and string, ribbon, or whatever could be strung through those to hang them. The letters, however, had no such holes.....


As I was looking for ribbon (that I wanted to waste) to put behind each letter, I found my stash of tulle. Tulle .... Hmmmm ..... YES!!!

Each letter was adhered to the tulle and the pennants were hung as mentioned before.

This gave the banner a bit of a floating effect.




It's difficult to see with the busy background, though.





I think that I would do the letters in a lighter color should I do this again. The purple (which I thought looked ... majestic) doesn't show up as well as I would have hoped. The pennants were embossed with the Disney Princesses using the Cuttlebug.


The banner over Rayland Castle with 2 beautiful princesses under it.













Hope you have a great Friday and a great, big, beautiful tomorrow!! :)


~*Shell*~

May Challenge #4

One more time. :)

On this card, the image and the embossed background came in the challenge kit.



The ribbon and flower brad were in my stash. The image was colored using Copics, and it was put up on pop dots to add some dimension to the card.



The big flower is exactly the same as the little ones that I've used on the other cards. This shows the difference in the size of the flowers. The pink one was included in the challenge kit. I imported that flower into SCAL to cut the big flower and the shadow on it. I really like that flower and plan to use it on many other things!





Up next: A birthday banner using SCAL, paper, and tulle. :)

Have an awesome Monday and a great, big, beautiful tomorrow.

~*Shell*~

May Challenge #3

The embossed background on this card is from the May challenge kit. The tree branch embossing worked really well with the swing image. The image came from an SU set that I bought in the spring. I love it because I can use my Copics .... yet again. :)



I had the ribbon on hand and collected the brads at some point in the past. :) I love the butterflies and the hearts. The layer behind the image is Night of Navy. All paper - to my knowledge - is SU.





I have one more challenge card done and will post that soon. I used SCAL on it and really like the way it turned out.

I hope all of you have a wonderful Saturday night and a great, big, beautiful tomorrow.

~*Shell*~

May Challenge #2

How many cards can I get out of the May challenge kit?? Well, so far, I'm up to 4. I think I can get 2 more cards out of the things I have left. :) We'll see.

I thought the colors on this card turned out very pretty and that it would work well for my mom for Mother's Day - she's pretty darn special, ya know. :) :)

A wonderful friend on my Cricut thread over on SCS decided to clean out her crafting area. She decided, too, that she wanted to get rid of a few things. One of the tools that she chose to part with was the tag maker by MM. I told her that if she really, really didn't want it, I would love to try it out. Oh my. She sent the tool, as well as a TON of the rims that go with it. THANK YOU, DIANA!!! It gave me the freedom to make the tulip image into a metal-rimmed tag. I love the effect that it had.




The flowers at the bottom of the card were made by yours truly and worked great with the paper colors I chose.




The paper is all SU, the image is colored Copics, and the blue and white background layers were cut using SCAL. The blue layer was embossed using the Cuttlebug. The dragonflies in the background are from a Clear Dollar Stamps set (All About Spring).





Another challenge card coming soon.

Hope you have a great Thursday evening and a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. :)


~*Shell*~