Crafty As L

  Late September and early October is a busy few weeks for birthdays for me (my own included!) and this year there were two big birthdays thrown into the mix; my sister's 50th (last week's post) and my friend’s 60 th .   This card idea had popped up on my Facebook feed as an Etsy advert so I dug out my Cricut and attempted to make my own version. To begin, I got a free SVG download of a birthday candle and imported it into Cricut’s Design Space, where I manipulated it and created background layers to mount the candles on.   I then dug out some coordinating patterned papers and set the Cricut busy cutting. I had designed 6 strips of 10 candles and had decided to stick the candles onto both sides so there were a lot of cut outs!  The next step of gluing all the bits in place turned out to be quite arduous and I was starting to regret my decision to make this. However, once I stuck the sections together, I was glad that I’d persevered as I could see that it was going to

  Last month, my ‘little’ sister turned 50.   That made me feel old!   She is a huge cat fan so that was to be my theme.   When I first got Visible Image’s limited-edition Purr-fect Birthday stamp set, I immediately thought that the various images would be perfect for using on a triple step card, like the one I made here . Usually, I work in inches but, after reading my own blog post, I remembered that the card wouldn’t fit in the envelope so this time I used cm and cut a rectangle 22.5cm x 13.5cm and scored it at 4.5cm/2.25cm intervals .   I also added an extra element with the fold out card at the front, cutting a card base 4.5cm x 9cm and scoring in the centre.   To start, I cut and scored the card bases. Next, I cut all the mat and topper sections.   I cut the black mats 0.25cm smaller at   4.25cm/2cm square and the toppers 0.25cm smaller than the mats at 4cm/1.75cm.  It requires 2 large black, 3 large white and 7 each of the smaller squares (not 6 as shown here). I got s