Wedding Invites

It has been a while, but I realized I never posted pictures of my wedding invites.  These invites are the whole reason i bought my Cricut and Cuttlebug in the first place; however, once I started paper crafting I wanted to do anything but work on invites and instead spent the first 4 months making other stuff.  I did manage to eventually focus on designing and making my invites once I was thoroughly familiar with all of my machines.

The creation of these invites involved use of the Cricut, Cuttlebug, Minc, Colorprinter, and Inkjet Printer, as well as traditional crafting tools (glue gun, adhesive, paper cutter, ect.)  All of the invites had to be printed twice. Once in the color ink jet printer for color text and black text I didn't want in silver, and then run through a laser jet printer for the items I wanted in silver foil. The silver only sticks to laser printer ink.  I really loved the Minc, the foil really brought the design up a notch, I just had trouble getting the foil and had to special order it.  The Cuttlebug was used to die cut out the seal on the front.  The boarder around the die-cut was hand drawn, scanned, then printed in laser jet on cardstock, then run through Minc to attach the foil. The bows where individually made.

The Cricut was used to cut out the design on the back of the invite which is an Anna Griffin cut from Cricut online.  The only problem with invites is you have to make a lot of them and the more complex the design the longer it takes.  I took several weekends for me to complete 100+ invites; however, it was totally worth it. I loved the look and I am sure it would have been a small fortune to have a printer make them.

Front of invite with seal.  One side of seal was hot glued on, the other with just removable double sided tape so it opened easily

Inside of invite.  The pocket folder is plum purple.  The text is black and plum. The laurel motive is in silver using he mink and there are lavender accents used.  I had to scratch out the names, which kind of ruined the aesthetic, but hopefully you get the idea.

Back of invite. In later copies I got it to stick to cardstock better.

RSVP Card on plum card stock, with silver boarder, plum and black text. The boarder is a .gif from MS work I believe. I just printed in in Laser ink to get the foil to stick when I ran it through the Minc.

Anna Griffen Card Kit

Below are some pictures of some other cards made using another Anna Griffin card kit that I recieved as a Christmas present from my Mom.  So fast, easy, and the results are beautiful!  I added some embossed layers with ink on some of them and additional embellishments.

For My Mother in Law

, 

For My Mom 

A selection of more cards I made from this kit, I used some for thank you notes for wedding gifts

New Anna Griffin Goodies

I haven't posted in a while because I been busy.  Husband was luckily working an evening shift the same night as the HSN craft show and I was super excited to pick up some more Anna Griffin products to add to my collection. I ordered the Sunny Salutations Pop-up Kit, Flower Pot Decoupage, and Vintage Collage pieces.

So far I have only gotten the pop-up kit in the mail.  It is a lot of fun. It was a little more challenging than it seemed at first, to get all of the imagines to fit within the card and I had to remake my first attempt, but later got the hang of it.  These Anna Griffin card kits are so beautiful and easy to use, my Cricut is collecting dust. I am already thinking about getting the other pop-up kit.

This is for my dad, who likes fish, but also dogs, and growing geraniums.

Victorian Style Birthday Card

Below is a birthday card that was designed using Anna Griffin's images in Cricut Design Space. I used the cricut to cut the boarder and write the sentiment inside.  Then I used the cuttlebug to create the sentiment on the front and embossed it on a frame I downloaded from the Cricut library. I inked the saying to make it stand out.

Lastly I embellished the card with some Anna Griffin die-cuts, as well as some authentic victorian die-cuts and some pearl accents. Needless to say the recipient loved the card!

Paper Crafting with Victorian Die-Cuts

I recently was given a Cricut Air, which I have used to take my crafting to the next level.  For a while I was into making embossed paper using the pernambuco technique -- basically embossing by hand.  However, this was very labor intensive and it took forever to get a finished product. Now that I have a Cricut and Cuttlebug creating great looking products takes a fraction of the effort.  It took a while to get a hang of the Cricut Design Space, but after a few test projects I finally got the hang of it.

My mom had some old Victorian Die-Cuts of Cats, and I purchased some of flowers to elaborate my projects. Living in an historic house from the 1800s, I really like the Victorian aesthetic, especially after the long cold winter we have had this year.

For both projects I used the Cuttlebug to emboss paper, and then highlighted the image by inking it with a brayer.  The image at the top also includes boarders and frames cut using the Cricut Air.  Lastly I added some ribbon, pearl, and rhinestones accents to give it some bling.