Valentines Tutorial and Cricut Crawl Blog Hop Entry

Are you tired of the cold weather yet? I know I am. I teach and we were on our 15th snow day today.  So I decided to have a Mommy Day today and sent the girls to daycare to play while I got somethings done. The day started off great. I ran to Wal-mart then came home and got to work in my craft room making my girls Valentines Cards. Now my girls are only 21 months and 7 months old so I made the cards myself. Monday at daycare their classrooms are trading valentines and being into crafts I thought, "I can make them!" So after several days of intending to do them, I spent today getting them done. Anyone who knows me, knows I take FOREVER when I do projects. So one thing that excited me today was that I finished them in record time. The designs popped into my head and I went with it instead of second guessing everything and I LOVE how they turned out. Hope you like them.

Today I am going to show you how to make these sucker toppers.

For my older daughter I bought a $1 box of 4 suckers for the kids. Her class has 4 students in it including her so this was a very affordable project. I kept the packaging to keep my suckers in, but I altered the front and sides of the box to make it look nicer and not like a cheap box from the store. I random stamped the CTMH colonial white cardstock with blush and tulip inks and heart stamps. The smaller heart is from Close to my Heart from the Hello There set. The larger one I believe is from a Fancy Pants set. The Love sentiment is from Paper Studio and I did first generation stamping and then shadowed it with a second generation stamping both in tulip ink from CTMH. To do generation stamping is easy, stamping after inking is 1st generation, then stamp a second time without inking and that is 2nd generation, then stamp again without inking is 3rd generation, etc. I also made my own shimmer mist filling a bottle 2/3 full of water, adding reinker to liking, and then a dash of perfect pearls powder and spritzed my random stamping.

 To make the valentines candy toppers I used my Cricut Expression and the Accent Essentials Cartridge to make the hearts and the scalloped circles. The hearts were cut out from CTMH tulip cardstock at 2" and the scalloped circles were cut from a scrap of CTMH colonial white cardstock at 1.5".

 

I used my embossing pen to hand write the words "From: Mayli Milburn" on the back heart and then as seen below poured white embossing powder on them and used my heat gun to set it. I LOVE how this worked.

 

  I also stamped the letters "U R" in versamark ink using my CTMH Alphabet set that came with my Felicity Campaign Set. I did the same embossing technique as seen above to set these letters as well...really easy and very quick. I would stamp and pour embossing powder on each heart then set them all at once with the heat gun. (p.s. like my stamping mess?)

 Here is a shot of my other supplies, you can see I also stamped all my scalloped circles at once for easy assembly. The circles going on the front of the hearts were stamped with the sentiment "so sweet" from the CTMH stamp set Just for Girls. The circle going on the back heart was stamped with the sentiment "Handmade with Love" from the CTMH stamp set Made with Love.

 Here is the finished sucker from the back. I pop dotted the scalloped circles on each heart for dimension.

Now I have a 7 month old girl as well and she is one of 8 in her nursery classroom.  Since the babies don't eat suckers, I just made cards. I had these 4.5" circle cards laying around left over from a previous project. I had made them using my SCAL software and my Cricut machine. I used CTMH chocolate ink to distress the edges, Bazzil Basics Black textured cardstock, and the dot border is from the CTMH stamp set Jingle Borders. Other than that the front was made the same way as the suckers except I pop dotted the heart and the scalloped circles this time.

 Can you read those names? My girl is Emersyn, but this just goes to show you that people are trying to be more unique.

 Close up of the front. I did my daughters first and used a first generation border, but thought it was a bit too strong and took away from the heart.

 So I changed it to second generation stamping for the others.

 Back of the card. Stamps from CTMH sets Made with Love and Angel Policy.

 Inside of the cards were stamped with the Felicity Alphabet stamp again and hand written salutation was done with my embossing pen and black glitter embossing powder.

What did you think? Was it tacky to give myself a shameless plug? I just wanted people to know where to find my other artwork ideas, so hope it was not a bad idea to include that.

Now I am sitting in my very cold living room writing this post. After this amazing day of getting projects done I managed to have enough time to visit an antique store in search of cheap things I could re-purpose. Went to the library, picked up the girls and when we got home....discovered my HEAT WAS OUT AGAIN THIS WEEK!!! Only this time we could not get it going again and heating guy can't be reached for some reason (we have his work and cell #'s). So I am sitting here getting colder and colder and hoping my girls don't get any sicker from this. Little one already has a cold. We may converge into one room tonight with room heater. It is probably 50 something degrees in here right now. Well, at least it was a good day...cause tonight is going to be rough.