Valentine’s day is coming up. Not really my favorite holiday, because I am not really all that fond of hearts. Never really have been. I even had an anti-pink period in my life. Don’t worry, I got over it.
I have boys who need to give out Valentines at school, to both boys and girls. They are two and four so I have a hard time wanting to hand out cards that say ‘be mine’ or ‘my valentine’ or anything like that. There are lots of great alternatives now, and really punny ones too. I typically like to make something for the kids to hand out, but this year I am so far behind and if I did make something I would have to double it cause now both kids are in preschool.
Yesterday I decided to just buy valentines for the kids to hand out.
EEKK!!! I KNOW! who is this lady?
But I couldn’t go with out making anything for the kids. I love the Tic-Tac-Toe Valentine’s I have been seeing lately and decided to design my own for the kids at school.
In Silhouette Studio I designed the game board and some x’s and o’s. Only I wanted them a little thicker so I cut out 5 layers of each x & o and glued them together.
The boys will give one to each kid, from both of them, but not as their valentines cards. Just a fun gift and they can play it at school during the party.
I wanted to make a free printable for you guys, but didn’t want you to have to cut out all those little x’s & o’s. So I made your game pieces in circles to cut out.
You can click on the picture to download it or go here.
Please note this design is for PERSONAL USE only please. Please do not forward, share, sell or distribute the files for any commercial purposes or claim as your own design. Thanks a bunch!
I feel a little behind this year. Ian’s birthday is next month and I have only been working on his invitations for about a week.
Ian decided in December that he wanted a Ninja Turtle birthday party. I knew it was on the list of parties but didn’t know he wanted it this year. (He has the next six birthday’s planned, yep, he takes after me.)
I decided I wanted his invitations to be a pop-up card with the front as a sewer cover. I designed them knowing I would need to use my favorite thing about the Silhouette. It’s Print ‘N Cut feature!
It is the main reason I got it and it just so happens that this month’s Silhouette Challenge was to make a project using this very thing I love so much.
I started with a picture of a NYC manhole cover. I used Photoshop to make the sewer cover look a little more comic-booky. I couldn’t find a TMNT one with out words on it, and while I could have altered it in Photoshop to remove the words, I just didn’t want to go the trouble, this was easier.
I had thought about having just a circle card, but the pop-up part would have been to small, or the circle card would have been too big. So I used a card template from SVG CutsHaunted Forest kit.
I needed something above the manhole cover, and I didn’t want to use a solid color so I used a picture of NYC that I found on one of the TMNT sites. Since the angle of the city is from the street it worked perfectly. For that part and the sewer cover I used the fill with pattern feature, or more accurately, I dragged and dropped the pictures into the shapes.
I used foam dimensional tabs to raise the ‘Let’s Party’ text.
I didn’t want to apply the letters individually to each invitation. I connected them with the offset tool, I made the offset as small as possible while still maintaining connections between each letter.
It was still in two parts, but that was better than 9 parts.
I made the “Ian is turning 5” part in Photoshop and traced it in Studio.
But a TMNT party invitation would not be complete with out some Ninja Turtles!
p.s. I decided to use the Old-School version from my childhood because I like them the best.
I traced a PNG copy of a picture of the four of them coming out of a sewer. This was the part that I wanted to use as a pop-up.
It is pretty amazing how close and accurately the Silhouette cuts with the print ‘n cut feature. I could even cut out the little spaces on the bottom that would have been white after printing. There is no way I would have been able to cut that out by hand.
The party information will be printed out on vellum and attached to the bottom of the inside. I decided on vellum because I didn’t want the inside to be white. I could have printed it on colored paper, but with the size of the card I couldn’t get two on one page, and I hate wasting paper.
Stay tuned for how the party turned out and all the other things I will make, although you will have to wait till a couple of months.
Want to Check Out More Silhouette Projects?
My Silhouette Challenge buddies and I are all sharing projects on our blogs today, so pursue the projects below for a wealth of Silhouette inspiration! With a heavy emphasis on hearts!
This summer I ran a half-marathon located in another city. The location wasn’t that far, maybe an hour or an hour and a half from home. But when you need to be there at six in the morning that is very far!
So my cousin and I decided to stay the night before the race. The race was in the wine country and there are not a lot of hotels around there. But there are a lot of bed and breakfast places. The other thing the surrounding city had was rooms for rent located in people’s houses. You could rent the room, like a bed and breakfast, but there wouldn’t be other guests.
As it turned out my cousin had a friend who grew up down there and that friend’s parents still live there. And they had a room that they rent out to guests and they were gracious enough to let us stay the night there. Because of their generosity, I want to make them a thank you card and a little gift.
I first used some crayons from my son’s art kit and made a little rainbowish pattern on a mini canvas. The min canvases and easels can be found at Michel’s Craft Store and are about 3″x3″.
Using my Silhouette Cameo I cut out the dandelion, floating seeds and words out of different colored vinyl. Because of the waxy nature of the crayons and the texture of the vinyl I went ahead and sealed it all with some Mod Podge, then added the adhesive rhinestones.
I thought the words ‘relax’ and ‘breathe’ fit well with the room they let us use. It was a very calming house and atmosphere, which was just the thing we needed prior to our race.
I also designed and cut out this thank you card using my Silhouette Cameo.
UPDATE:
My dutiful sister has informed me that the canvas says ‘breath’ when I intended it to say ‘breathe’
*sigh* such is my life. it is always after I post it that she finds the errors…
We are now at the point in our lives where we aren’t attending weddings every weekend of the summer.
It seems that you have two waves of wedding times. For the first few years out of high school it seems like your summer weekends are only weddings. Then there is a time when you don’t really attend any weddings, maybe one or two. Then about your early 30’s you start getting all the invitations to the rest of your friends weddings. After that, you may get one or two a year, and usually they are family members kids or for the wedding of someone younger than yourselves.
This year we only have two weddings. One of which we are traveling across the country for and one that happened in the summer.
The one we attended this summer was a wedding of one of my husbands friends. He is an artist, a very wonderful painter, and for his invitations he drew and painted a hydrangea bouquet. I thought the perfect gift would be a large glass vase with the same picture etched on it.
Turns out, his style of painting and my starting on the project late, made for the inability to trace the image and create a stencil.
So I did the next best thing. Found another picture of a hydrangea that I could trace, and made a stencil out of it.
I like the glass vases that have the word “flower” etched on it in some foreign language, usually in French. The groom is Irish and so I decided to use the Gaelic word for flowers which is bláthanna. Singular for flower would be bláth.
So I found a fancy font with swirls but it was a little thin, so I had to create an offset to make it a little easier to cut.
To keep with the floral, nature theme I made a card with a Cherry Blossom tree. I found this card base at Bird’s Cards, it’s a free download. I decided to make it a shaker card adding more cherry blossom flower and glitter.
Big glass vases that are already decorated can come at a larger price tag. By decorating it myself, not only could I make it more personal without breaking the bank, and on short notice.
I Tri and Craft 