You've got to take a look. My excitement for today! Great news for SCAL users!

I'm sure in the past, you've heard me talking about The Lettering Delights.  (Now, before I go on, I must again apologize to Leo and Mary for my post, but in the long run, the more SCAL users there are, that's a good thing, right?)  This site made the cutest graphics and dingbats for digital scrapbooking and crafts.  AND NOW, just TODAY, they announced that they are going to be making SVG files!  If you go to their site and go to SVGs, you can get two free collection for the limited time!

(http://www.letteringdelights.com/clipart:merriment-9825.html and http://www.letteringdelights.com/clipart:merriment_alpha-9846.html)

How cute are these files! and they're FREE!!!  They have some other collections and they range between $3 to $6. 

If you don't have SCAL, that is one more reason that you should really be investing in this amazing software.  You can get SCAL at Pumpkin Cart Crafts the cheapest at $20 off regular price.

Dinner crackers.

This was a project I did a while back, for last year's Christmas Eve party. A little out of season? Well, yes, but one could personalize these crackers to spice up any dinner occasion.

Using the free Christmas cracker file on SVGcuts.com, I decided to make my own Christmas crackers for my Christmas Eve party. To make things a little more unique, using SCAL, I welded the ribbon strip from Rosie's Ribbon Strips (9th strip - also a file from SVGcuts.com), embossed the middle section with Cuttlebug snowflakes folder and used white pearl stamp to bring out the images.


I also made snowflake napkin holders to match the crackers. The snowflakes were from various Cricut carts, and I added Martha Stewart cystal coarse glitter, embellished the center with a rhinestone and adhered them to a round cut-out base with pop-dots.


Inside the crackers, I put in 3 Lindt chocolates, a different question in each to spice up the conversation, and had one grand prize of $50 gift certificate to a fancy steak house. This was a highlight of our party!

I submitted this in for SVG cuts December challenge (had to use a Christmas/winter related files from that site), and I was chosen as a grand prize winner :)

My recent fun purchase.

Recently I just purchased Pebbles Inc Chalk Sets from another one of my daily steals sites, scrapbooksteals.com. I never realized how versatile these things are - I can chalk the edges, just like you do with stamps. You can also go over your embossing to accentuate the patterns. You may color your stamp images as well.

I admit that I initially purchased this because it had such beautiful and modern packaging (and how many other things do I purchase because of this reason????), but this tool has proven to me how much it can add to my projects. It comes with 3 sizes of pom poms, and you use applicator to apply chalk to your crafts. They apply very well, and stays on better than regular chalks.


My two cards here - I have chalked the edges of all the words and I also chalked the border of the cards. Look how much difference it makes to a card!

(In case you wanted to know, "candles/presents/cake/party" was made from SCAL, "may all your wishes come true" came from Sweet Treats, and the border is from Storybook (I welded the edges together to make a card.)

Bubble Bath.

I just dressed up my bathroom with various-sized bubbles from bubble dingbat (dafont.com). The best thing about this was that I was able to cut these bubbles using SCAL from the same sheet that I used to cut dinosaurs to decorate my son's room. So, I decorated two rooms using only 2 of 12 X 24 white vinyl sheets. Bubbles were so easy to put on the wall as it didn't require any precision measurements - I just tried to put the smaller bubbles more on top.

A simple bubble, but it just added so much to my plain bathroom.

My son's dinosaur room.

My son is 7, and we recently bought him a stitched dinosaurs duvet cover. The duvet cover is beautiful, and very simple. I knew that the wall decor had to have the clean, modern look to bring out this duvet cover.

Using the Cricut and SCAL once again, I used the Ding-O-Saurs font to cut white vinyl. I was happy with all the details on these dinosaurs. I also cut small dinosaurs out from 6 different shades of green cardstock and using pop-dots, aligned them in a shadow box frame. Voila!

My son loved how his room looked!

3-D Flower Topiary

This project was made a few months ago, and I created this to enter for the 3-D Flower Challenge over at SVG CUTS(http://svgcuts.com). The rule was to use their 3-D flower files that you can purchase (Leo and Mary makes gorgeous SVG files to use with your SCAL and Cricut)and create anything that you can think of. I used the 3-D Flowers SVG kit 2 and 3-D Mums and Fall Flowers SVG Kit, and decided to create a flower topiary.

Although I have seen flower topiaries, they were all made from real flowers, and I have never seen this done with paper. I looked for many hours online to study what flowers and what colors go together. I decided to use light colors - pinks, creams, browns, and light greens. I was very excited to get to this point!

I worked on this for days - and created 61 flowers measuring between 1" to 2"(windflower, gerber daisy, spider mum, and dublin mum and using few extras from these files to create some flowers of my own). Each flower is made up of about 5 layers of paper, and each layer is curled to give it a natural look. These layers were then glued together. I then glued these onto the styrofoam ball (6" in diameter) and used bamboo stick for the stem, put into a pot and trimmed it with a ribbon.

I love the way this turned out - so springy and cheerful.

I ended up receiving the Grand Prize from them (here's the link: http://svgcuts.com/forum/index.php?topic=1597.0). This just made my day :)