Sweet Strawberry - Celebrate with Flourish & Lacey Labels

Happy Bitten by the Bug 2 Monday!  This week's challenge cut was selected by our sweet Design Team sister, Jeri.   Jeri chose the strawberry cut from the Simply Charmed cartridge.  I do not have Simply Charmed so I chose a different strawberry; I selected the strawberry from Celebrate with Flourish.  If you decide to play along and participate in the weekly challenge, you too can use any strawberry cut.  Just be sure to link your strawberry project to the BBTB2 blog!

And before we get into today's card, I have one more thing to share.  I liked Jeri's idea of a strawberry cut so much that I have decided to go with a berry theme for the week.  This card is the first of six berry themed projects that I plan to share this week.

I used all four layers of the Celebrate with Flourish strawberry and actually created a fifth layer for the leaves and stem.  I cut the icon image - the main strawberry - a second time in green cardstock.   I used micro-tipped scissors and trimmed the top of the strawberry adding the bottom layer of leaves.

I finished the strawberry with a ribbon, a flower charm, and assorted pink buttons.  I also added a few black doodles to the berry.

My main card pieces were cut using the Lacy Labels cartridge.  I welded the base card pieces together in Design Studio, then cut the same shape a second time a bit smaller.  I then cut two ovals on which to mat my berry and words.

Do you ever hate using quick dry glue?  I did when I used it on the word "Sweet", which was cut using Kate's ABC's. My word was not placed onto the matting correctly and then I could not move the word without ripping the paper.  Grrrr. 

As I stated above, this is the first of six berry themed projects I will be sharing this week.   Come back tomorrow for another berry flavored project!  In the meantime, you can head over to BBTB2 and check out the design teams strawberries!

Cricut Craft Room - First Project

If you read my blog last Saturday you may remember that I was having a difficult time with printing and cutting on my Imagine in the Cricut Craft Room.  Well... now having actually READ the information on the Craft Room, I discovered that it was a ID-10-T error (idiot) - the Imagine is not yet linked to the Craft Room.  Duhh.  So sheepishly I went back to the CR and selected Cricut Expression as my machine and VOILA! It worked wonderfully well!  I cannot wait to link up my Imagine also.

I used Lacy Labels exclusively to create this card.  The base card was created by welding two of the same shape together and was then cut in a double sided cardstock.  I then cut two toppers, in the same shape, in a dark brown cardstock and a reverse of the base card cardstock.  Finally I cut the branch with bird cut and the word Bliss.

After using my ATG gun to assemble all of the large pieces I got out some Copic markers and attacked the foliage branch and the word Bliss.  First I added two different greens to the leaves and then tan to the branches.  I finished the branch with a thin brown marker, adding dots and dashes to highlight random stem areas and leaves.  I used both green and blue markers on the work Bliss, and finished the word with white ink dots.  I chose to leave the bird solid cream so that the stark simplicity would pop off of the card. 

Before I affixed the branch to the base card I found a little bag of goodies that I received in the goody bag swap at the Cricut Circle Crop in Atlanta.  The package contained the great aqua colored trim and two coordinating buttons.  I attached the trim to the branch and then, adding two brown flowers, I sewed the buttons onto the branch sides.

I finished the card by adding an aqua-ish flower behind the bird to frame him.

I think you are all going to love the Cricut Craft Room when it goes public later in the month.  To me it takes the best parts of Gypsy and Design Studio and combines them into a great piece of software.  Oh, and for those like me that love DS but HATE the tiny images - the images are bigger too!!!  Woo-hoo!!!