My how we change.

Do you ever look through your old cards and see how your crafting style has changed? It's so easy to tell what trends were in at the time. Much like you can tell what year it was by your hair style. Ugh, big fluffy bangs and spritzed out side wings...can anyone say hello 80's!!!

These cards were all made in 2008.

Card for my Sweetie

It is SO hard for me to make cards for men for two reasons:

~ I can't make a card without it being 'pretty'
~ I don't think men really care about cards

But I still make them for family members and of course, for my sweetie.



For this I used the Cuttlebug dotted embossing folder, and Stampin' Up for the sentiment. The blurry image below is to show the dimension of the focal point.




This card, by Nichole Heady, was my inspiration. It's the perfect man card...pretty but not too fru-fru.

Card using "Just Because Cards"

Okay so I'm super excited to tell you about this card. I used a feature on my Gypsy that I JUST learned about and I'm gonna bust. Jerry, I'm bustin! The feature turns off certain cuts in an image. That's right...you heard me. You can actually make the machine ignore certain things that it would normally cut. It's on the 'advanced' tab and the icon looks like 2 right angles.

From the Just Because Cards cartridge, I put the "Bee Happy" stencil image on my mat. If you aren't familiar with this image, it is an oval with the words "bee happy" cut out of the center. I also put the phrase "happy" from the same cartridge on my mat. Sized both to the dimensions I wanted.

I didn't want the card to say "bee happy" but I still wanted to use the oval, so I turned off the bee happy cuts. Then I moved the word "happy" onto the oval and centered it, then welded it. The result is what you see on the card.

To grasp how fabulous this feature is, let me tell you a little story. I needed to cut out about 25 baby dresses. The only cartridge I had at the time would cut out a dress but also had bloomers that I didn't need. So, to not waste paper, I had to sit with the machine while it cut the dress and then press the cancel button before it started cutting the bloomers. Yep, x25. How tedious! The whole point of having an automated machine is so you DON'T have to babysit it, right? So you can see how the 'uncut' feature would have saved me a ton of time.

Maybe I'm the last person to learn how to use this feature...I mean I don't even know what it's called, but do you realize how many more options you now have? It jacks up the number of things you can make by like a bazillion percent. Okay raise your hand if you want to marry your Gypsy. Am I the only one?

Stay pretty!

Sunburst Card

This is basically a copy of a card I saw on the cover of one of the card or paper crafting magazines. Can't remember which one. But anyway, here is my version.