Birthday Present Stand-In

When your children start to get older, birthday presents get a bit more complicated.  There are many things that they'd like but it is difficult to choose exactly the right style or model to suit their wishes.  Sometimes it is easier to just shop with them, but you still want to have something to wrap up for the cake and candles time!

My neighbor's daughter wanted a cell phone for her birthday and we stopped by a local toy store to see if they had a toy phone that she could wrap up and give her daughter until they could go to the phone store (we were thinking of something for a couple of dollars just to serve as a placeholder...).  The only phone they had was much more expensive and then I realized - we didn't need a toy phone, we could cut one out of paper to serve the temporary stand-in purpose.

 There is a cell phone on the Locker Talk cartridge.  This is an older cartridge and I always thought it was a bit too cartoonish.  However, when I needed to exchange a duplicate cartridge a few years ago, this was the only one the store had in stock that I didn't already own (remember, there used to be far fewer cartridges and stores usually do not stock all of them).

This particular phone is a dated style but still recognizable as a cell phone.  There are three pieces - a base, shadow and blackout layer. There is also a small circle to layer as a button at the top but I chose not to use this.

I cut the layers and quickly assembled the phone (I volunteered to make the phone since my neighbor would need to drive the girls to their activities all afternoon).  The blackout layer is a glitter cardstock and reminded me of a phone keypad - even though it is in the screen area...

 I added a cute flower and a peel off Happy Birthday sentiment on the front.

I had a gift bag that I made quite a while ago - it turned out to be just about the right size to hold the phone.  I added the blue gem to the flower on the bag to coordinate with the phone colors.

The purse style bag and the flower are from the Tags, Bags, Boxes and More cartridge - one of the ones I "had to have" when I got my first Cricut.  There are bags and boxes on many cartridges now but this used to be one of the few places to find these handy little items.

Mission accomplished - I left a bag with the finished surrogate gift hanging on the front door so it could be smuggled into the house in time for the birthday dinner. 

The moral to the story - Sometimes you already have what you need - you just have to remember that you have it!

 Don't forget, tomorrow is the Disney Pixar blog hop.  I have two projects and I am trying to decide which one to post - maybe I'll just post both of them...

Have a great day!

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College and Recital Word Books

I participated in a word book challenge on the Cricut Message Board and today is the day for "revealing" our files. Mine are pretty simple - there were some amazing creations designed by the talented people on the message board!

Here is a LINK to the original thread where some of the books were posted as the designers finished them and you can find the thread where the other files were posted HERE . Many thanks to Joann Caraballo for organizing this swap!



The first book I did was "College." I placed the pennant on the front so that a smaller cut of the appropriate college name could be added. Of course you can choose the colors that represent the school - I used the colors of my alma mater for this sample! I chose the font from Cuttin Up for a more casual feel - I thought of this as a book for photos of college friends. The pennant is from Locker Talk and could be deleted if you don't have that cartridge - you could then cut the college name and place it vertically on the front page, allowing room for binding.



Next I did "Recital." After years of piano lessons as a child (and young adult) I think of it as a piano recital but you could change the papers and perhaps add a cut to make it work for a dance recital as well. I used the Teardrop font for the letters because the "drop" parts reminded me of musical notes. There is a page in the file with some extra musical note cuts from the Stretch Your Imagination cartridge which are optional but could be used to decorate the pages. You will see that they go with a singing bird and I rotated and moved most of the design off the mat to try to cut only the notes.



For the test cut example I used black and white musical note paper but found the overall effect a bit busy and so substituted black on alternating letters. (So now I will have to do an opposite version to use up the note pages I cut as a test!).

In order to make these as useful as possible I created them using both George and Plantin Schoolbook. They are sized at 5 x 11 so will fit on either an Original Cricut, the new Create (you will need to have George or Plantin Schoolbook or adapt the design using a square/rectangle from a cartridge that you own) or the Expression.

Since I am totally occupied with family birthdays this week I have not finished embellishing and have not bound these yet (I think it is easier to work with the flat pages before binding. I just wanted to get them posted today and will add more photos of the finished books when I get a chance to finish them up!

Here are the files for each design - Enjoy these!

College Word Book - George

College Word Book - Plantin Schoolbook

Recital Word Book - George

Recital Word Book - Plantin Schoolbook