Its tough to choose what letters to use. We started using D’N’A because we are nerdy. But then we got Qi. DAQ or QAD are ok. I don’t love what I came up with, I mean its cute enough, but I wouldn’t make it our official one. I will have to think about it and come up with something new.
Does anyone else have any monogram fails? Any tips or tricks?
We attended a fall themed wedding in late September. It was a beautiful ceremony in a garden that looked like it was made for weddings, on a family farm. It certainly didn’t feel like fall though! The weather was beautiful!
I chose a pretty simple layout, to let the gorgeous invitation take center stage.
I cut a few simple hearts for embellishments.
I cut out the rings from a golden-yellow cardstock and did several layers of gold glitter glue on top.
The first was using resist technique for the flower, which I found on Pinterest:
And the second was ombre paint swatch cards:
When I saw the flower, it made me think of the flower design that came with my Silhouette Stamping Kit.
So I made a run to the Home Hardware down the street and we were in business!
First I had to cut the stamp. It was super easy. I just loaded the mat the same as I would a regular one and set the blade on 9 like it told me to when I selected the media type.
Unfortunately it doesn’t quite fit on the biggest acrylic block that came with the kit, but I wanted it off the edge anyways for the card. I did a couple of test stamps:
Yuck. But it got better. I cleaned the stamp with stamp cleaner and then tried again. A little bit better. After reading up on stamps, I learned about something called “priming” a stamp where you have to stamp a couple of times before it starts looking good.
Here is it a couple stamps later with embossing powder on it:
Looking MUCH better.
And here it is stamped and embossed with clear powder on the card:
PERFECT!
Then I used some of my test stamps to try the resist technique:
Not a fan. I busted out my watercolors instead.
We’re getting there! Copy paper is an in-ideal medium for watercolors though.
There, that was what I was envisioning!
Now for the letters. I didn’t have any letter punches like they used for the dragonfly card, but I do have a Silhouette and PicScan mat which are even better.
Originally this was going to be a thank you card but as I was working with it, it really felt more like a Mother’s day card. Plus the paint swatch had 7 colors and thank you has 8 letters, while mother has only 6.
I chose a courier font as I wanted the letters to be the same width, (originally I was going to make this a vertical card….visions change!). I found it a tad too thin so I did what I always do when I want to cut out a word in a thin font: I ungrouped the word and then did an external offset on each letter so that they were all a tiny bit thicker.
I cut them all out (cardstock setting works perfectly) and glued them on.
TIP: use white glue/mod podge and a little paintbrush or adhesive roller on the paint swatch letters. I made paint swatch cards before where I used glue stick and they kept falling off.
Anyone got any other stamping tricks I should know about?
Design Used:
-Stamping Kit Flower
(Unfortunately not available unless you buy the stamp kit)
For our 5 year anniversary, we went to O Noir, where you eat in the dark and are served by blind waiters. It was such a neat experience! We then went to see Cats the musical. I used the Cats brochure as well as Braille to come up a theme/color scheme for this layout.
I used an online Braille translator to translate the word LOVE to Braille. I saved that as a picture and imported it into Silhouette Studio. I traced it and cut it from black cardstock.
I also used a (dot font) for the picture frame.
I love the infinity love symbol, despite it being slightly overused these days.
The word Anniversary was cut out of black magazine paper. I just wanted to see if the Silhouette would cut it and it did. It gives the letters a nice glossy look. I used copy paper settings to cut it. I gave it an offset for the backing and removed the inside offset cut lines (inside the A swoop, etc),
Simple dots as a frame tie the look together. I also found those awesome clear frame stickers at the dollar store.
For Qi’s second birthday, we threw him a little “party” and made him a “cake” from wet food (pate base and chunky gravy chicken “frosting,” treat “sprinkles”), Yeah I’m a crazy cat lady. I also had been saving the labels from his favorite flavor of wet food to use in a layout.
I took the (Q) and (i) from a letter sticker pack, and glued them onto a patterned paper with an (‘s) on it, and used the PicScan mat to cut around the letters.
Looking at this now, I should have used Sketch Pens to write the date. My handwriting is atrocious.
When I got invited to a wedding last summer, I knew exactly which cut file I wanted for the card. I loved it so much I was just waiting for an excuse to use it.
I only had one little problem with it… There were two little flowers on the bottom left that are not attached to the design and I keep losing them after I cut it out.
So I Released the Compound Path, and Ungrouped the design. I made the flowers a bit bigger and moved them up to slightly overlap the two above them. And then I clicked Weld from the Modify Window. Then I regrouped everything and made it back into a compound path.
Much better! I saved it to my library as a new file so whenever I get invited to another wedding, I have it ready to go.
I used a pearl pen and some glitter glue on the petals and cut out Congrats from gold-painted paper using the font Simply Glamorous.
Do you have any favorite designs that you go to time and time again?
I absolutely adore theme parks. Roller coasters, etc. Which is why I was sooooo happy that Dylan said yes when I asked him if we can go to Toronto/Canada’s Wonderland for a midweek trip (he hates theme parks). We decided to make a romantic getaway of it, booked a BnB, got reservations at a nice restaurant, took the train up…
And making this layout was ALMOST as much fun as the trip… because I has JUST gotten my new PicScan mat and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.
TIP- fast passes are sooo worth it.
I took the theme park map, cut it to size and placed it on the PicScan mat. I took a photo with my iPhone and uploaded it to Studio. I then placed hearts around places on the map- our favorite rides, and around edges and cool patterns in the map. It then cut out the hearts exactly where I wanted them.
I was sooo happy with the result!
For the title, I found a .png of the Wonderland logo and used the trace feature in Studio to make the title and offset backing. I used the loopy cut file to represent roller coasters and used glitter glue to make it stand out from the rest of the blue cardstock.
TIP- use your embossing heat gun to make glitter glue dry faster.
I was lucky with the BnB that they had such cute business cards. That whole trip was such fun, I enjoyed every minute of it.
TIP- take a photocopy of your receipts and cut them out instead of using the actual receipt which can fade over time. Or scan and print, that way you can make it bigger or smaller to fit your layout, and increase contrast in hard to read/already faded ones.
I really wish I had thought of that earlier, as I have a page or two in my book that have almost white rectangles now because receipt paper is so sensitive.
A throwback to my pre-Silhouette days. This is the intro page to our trip to Europe a couple years ago.
What I love most about this layout is the pocket I made for my travel notes.
I kept a little notebook and wrote down what we did each day. When we got back, I removed the spiral and bound it with twine. I cut a rectangle from a page protector slightly bigger than my notebook, and taped it onto the page protector in my scrapbook. (That’s why the photo was taken with the page in the page protector).
Do you have any neat tricks for keeping things like this together in a scrapbook?
I love this one, just because I felt so creative making it. There’s a game called Carcassonne that Dylan and I play ALL the time. So its a big part of our story.
And when we went to Europe, we got the chance to visit the city of Carcassonne, on which the game is based. This was super exciting for us. It’s a small medieval city in France that is really a tourist trap, but still totally worth visiting.
The layout is based on the tiles from the game which look like this:
And it has little player pieces that look like this:
Dylan and I always play black and red, so I made the little meeple with red and black construction paper. For the background, I drew the city on a manila envelope and cut it out by hand. I really wish Silhouette made a mat with registration marks on it so I could take a picture and make cut lines EXACTLY where I want them.
Also a neat trick I came up with while making this layout: I wanted a greyscale pattern that I only had in colored patterned paper. I didn’t have any grey paper whatsoever, So I took a paper in a pattern I liked and photocopied it. and it came out looking exactly like I had envisioned.
I made this card for my MIL’s birthday, when I realized I had no home-made birthday cards left. And I really wanted to play with my Silhouette.
My inspiration was this card:
As well as this one for the candles:
Of course I cut mine directly from Silhouette so it was one seamless card rather than sticking together two pieces of paper with letters. I used patterned yellow paper for the flames and a stamped, embossed and ink edged “Birthday” banner. I also used up a scrap of green patterned paper for the backing to the HAPPY, which I glued to the inside of the card to make the letters pop. The candles were washi tape.
If you want to make a similar card yourself, I have made a cut file with all of the necessary shapes.
You can fit two cards on one sheet of 8.5×11 cardstock.
