Cardmaking With Artbooking

This past Sunday, I held one of my Close To My Heart monthly card-making workshops at my home. I had three lovely ladies join me for a few hours of fun, laughs, and papercrafting. Since none of these ladies had seen the latest and greatest from the Autumn-Winter 2013 Idea Book, I decided to focus the workshop on the new Cricut “Artbooking” Collection. Now the “Artbooking” cartridge is heralded to be a scrapbooker’s dream (and it’s true, it is), but that in no way means that it isn’t a dream for card-makers as well! Let’s take a look at the four cards that we made this past weekend:

This first card uses two different cuts from “Artbooking” – a sunburst overlay, and a title – “fun & sun”. These are the images in the handbook:

 

There are two very important things to mention at this point. One is that because of the way this cartridge is programmed, if you want to cut an image at a specific size, you have to set the dial size, then press the “Real Dial Size” button. If you don’t, your image will print in proportion to the original page size that it was set to. For example, you’ll notice that the size of the album that both the “fun & sun” title and the sunburst overlay are associated with is 7”. When you set your dial size to 7” and cut the “fun & sun” title, it cuts to the size a title would be on that 7” page (i.e. – smaller than 7”). Therefore, if you set your dial size to, say, 2.5” (the actual size you’d like your title), and cut the image, it will cut proportional to 2.5” – much smaller than you want! Simply hit the “Real Dial Size” button before cutting, and you will get the size you expected. This rule holds true if you are cutting a shape for a coordinating stamp set as well.

The second thing to note is that in making “Artbooking” your best card-making friend, you will want to hook yourself up with the Cricut Craft Room (download it for free HERE). With CCR, you can select images from the cartridges you have and resize them to whatever you want (you can do so much more, of course, but for our purposes, resizing will do for now). The sunburst overlay was a bit longer than my 5.5” card, so I simply set the measurements to 5.5” x 4.25” and cut, for an exact fit for my card front. In doing so, the sunburst center became less of a circle and more of a skewed oval – but that was ok, because I was able to skew, rotate, and resize a circle image to fit that space just how I wanted.
 

This next card is sort of a re-do of a card design that’s included in the “Workshops on the Go Laughing Lola Cardmaking Kit”. It uses the stamp set that comes with the kit, however, I switched up the papers, since I didn’t have more “Laughing Lola”.

 

This card uses a snowflake overlay from the “Artbooking” cartridge, shown here:

 

Again, I re-sized the image in Cricut Craft Room to fit the card. The nutcracker image comes from the “Candyland” stamp set, and the patterned paper is from the “Frosted” pack, both of which are new in the Autumn-Winter Idea Book.

 

And last, but certainly not least, we put together this cool card using the notebook paper cut from “Artbooking”, and a couple of the stamp sets that come in the “Artbooking” collection. The “Washi Tape” is actually stamped as well – those images come from the Hostess Exclusive “Washi Wonder” stamp set. The notebook cut is shown here:

 

Oh what fun we had! I hope you can join me for my next workshop!

Fun Techniques - Emboss Resist

OK, this isn't the first time I have posted about the emboss resist technique, BUT this time there's a little twist. After reading the "Stamp It! Techniques" column in the September/October 2013 issue of Paper Crafts Magazine, I knew I was going to have to test it out. The twist here is that you stamp a pattern or background onto your base project first, then proceed with the emboss resist. Let me show you...

First, stamp a background image onto your project base. In my case, it's a card front:

Next, choose the image you will use for the resist. I chose the cupcake image from this month's Stamp of the Month, "A Chocolate Affair". Using VersaMark ink, random stamp this image over your background:

Now, cover the images with clear embossing powder and heat emboss:

Next comes the fun part! Using one or more different colors of ink and a large sponge dauber, swirl ink onto the base using a circular motion.(NOTE: For a more pronounced result with your embossed images, make sure the inks you use are darker that the color that you stamped your background in.)

After applying all of your colors, use a paper towel to wipe off any excess ink:

Isn't that so cool?! Here is the finished card:

I made the note above because I think my result would have been better if you couldn't see as much of the original orange background through the green and blue inks.

So, I decided to try another card, only this time I used a patterned paper instead of stamping a background. I used a nice, small pattern from the "Frosted" paper pack, and stamped on it with the image of a small piece of solid washi tape from the "Washi Wonders" set. This time, I used Twilight ink to cover the background, and I think it looks much better!

That is just so cool. It looks like I cut small pieces of the patterned paper and glued them over a blue version of the same paper. The snowflake patterned paper on the opposite side is also from the "Frosted" paper pack, and the snowman and sentiment are from the "Flakey Friends" stamp set. This was snow much...I mean SO much fun! I would LOVE to see what cool results you get with this technique!