Welcome to the Joyslife.com Birthday Blog Hop where we are wishing Joy a very happy birthday!! This is my very first blog hop so I hope I don't mess up! You may have come here from
Ann Marie's blog. If not, then you can do the whole hop by going to
Joyslife.com and clicking through to each blog on the hop. In case you get sidetracked, here is a list of all the stops in this hop.
So here is my birthday blog project. I decided to do a birthday place marker and cupcake picks. I love the new Lettering Delights Frogs and Kisses graphic set and svg set. Even though it seems to be a Valentine themed set, I thought it would make a cute froggy birthday theme. I did want to change the colors of my frogs so I used Photoshop to do that.
I used Make-the-Cut and my Cricut to cut out the parts for the place marker. The frog was directly from the svg file but I used googly eyes instead of the cut out eyes. I think frogs look great with googly eyes! I used various MTC functions to make the place marker with the sticking up part (technical terms here). The balloons were made from a balloon graphic I found online and converted to a cut file. For the two-tone balloons I cut out two, used punches to punch the holes, and then layered them together. I used some wire I had on hand to attach them to the place marker.
For the cupcake picks (easy peasy) I just chose a graphic from the Frogs and Kisses set, changed the colors in Photoshop, and resized and printed it onto card stock. For the other side I used a stamp from the
All Around Sentiments set from Joyslife.com. I punched my stamped images and my printed images with a circle punch, matted it onto a larger colored circle, and then layered those onto scalloped circles cut with nestabilities. I stuck them together with Stampin' Up Dimensionals with a toothpick in between to stick into the cupcake. The doily is cut from a file I found on
this blog and modified.
The bags were from Target. I like to keep bags on hand because I hate wrapping gifts. Hate it. The cupcakes are topped with crushed Smarties. Smarties are the Canadian version of M&Ms. Since my daughter is allergic to nuts, we don't buy M&Ms but Smarties are just as tasty and perfectly safe. I collected the red ones (had to eat a lot of other colored ones to get these), crushed them a little, and sprinkled them on.
Now for the blog candy, courtesy of Joy! Up for grabs is one of her amazing stamp sets, Lots of Pun. This is such a cute set! If you have the Create a Critter cricut cartridge you NEED this set-it goes perfectly with so many of the critters.
Here is how to win this set:
1. leave a comment on this post
2. become a follower and leave another comment letting me know you did. If you are already a follower of my blog, leave a comment letting me know that instead.
Sign ups end at midnight eastern time on Feb 22nd. Please make sure there's a way for me to get ahold of you. If you don't have your email in your blogger profile, please leave it in the comment for me. If you are interested in buying this or any of Joy's other stamp sets, just go to
Joyslife.com's products page. Joy is offering free shipping right now too!
And now on to the next blog in the hop. Just
click here to go to Erika's blog to see the next cool birthday project! But first, be sure to grab Joy's cute new button!! To add this button to your blog, simply copy and paste this code:
I started off using Make-the-Cut. I used the Mahalo set from Lettering Delights to make the coconut drink. When I make a shape to go on a card, I make a card-sized rectangle in Make-the-Cut first and then I can resize the shape to the right size for the card front. Then I just delete the rectangle or turn off that layer when I cut. For the letters I used a font called Grilled Cheese. I added the letters to the mat, then I used the bezier warp thing to make them curve the way I wanted them. This was done mostly through trial and error since I don't really know how all the controls on the bezier warp thing works. I added some tiny rectangles to some letters and used boolean join so that I wouldn't have to deal with putting the center parts on separately, but I made a couple of them too small and had to deal with it anyway. Once I got the word all done and sized, I found that the lines on the virtual mat in Make-the-Cut don't match up with the lines on my silhouette mat. So I exported the svg and opened it up in Silhouette Studio Designer Edition to do the cutting-it was a little easier to make sure the text was in the right spot for my card front. Before I cut, I did a test sketch on some white paper to make sure I had it in the right spot. The card stock is all from Stampin' Up and Bazzill. I used a Sakura Gelly Roll pen to make a little shiny spot on the cherry. The bottom border was done with a Martha Stewart border punch. I made the blue card base about an inch short on the front, then I added the orange card stock (after punching the border) so that it could be seen through the cut-out letters and on the bottom. I could have sworn I had it centered when I punched it but maybe that punch doesn't center as easily as my other ones do. Or maybe I just messed up.
