More Vinyl

Do you remember the post from a while back where I made a mickey cup for my cousin's birthday?  Well, she took it on their recent trip to the big D and someone stole it right from the stroller! With her personalized name and everything!  Can you believe that? 

Fortunately, I still had a red cup on hand, so I made her a replacement.  But I had to make it just a little bit better to make up for the loss. I made another mickey head with her name in it. I guess I should have saved my file from before.  It would have saved me the trouble of making a new one.  I used the car decal I had cut for my Mom for the other side.  That file I had saved.  But a couple of cuts later and some clear contact paper to save the little bits from the heavier use that cups see and it was all ready to go. 

Vinyl on Sunday

While waiting for the tomato sauce to reduce so we can finish canning it, I thought I would play in my craft room for a bit.  For our upcoming anniversary, hubby picked out a new tackle box and mentioned that he thought he needed some fish and pointed to a fish skeleton sticker in the store.  He also mentioned putting a Tigger on it.  So I looked through the Silhouette Design Studio store, but I couldn't find the right fish skeleton, so I found a picture on the web where the person provided a .pdf for downloading so people could play with it themselves.  Bingo!  I opened that in Photoshop, erased the background, created a layer, filled that with black and then made the black layer conform to the shape of the fish. Once saved as a bitmap, I popped that into Inkscape, traced the bitmap and saved it as a SVG.  Then I was able to open the SVG in Silhouette and re-sized it to the variety of sizes. 

Once I cut them out and put them on the front of the box, hubby said it needed a hook, line and bobber.  Well that's easy enough because the hook and bobber can be purchased in the Silhouette store.  Check.  Then some clear vinyl cut thinly for the fishing line and it was done.

Then on the to the Tigger.  It was super easy because he liked a design I had previously downloaded from Mardenz. 

Once the Tigger was on, hubby was looking at the back of the box and said it needed fish too.  So a few more cuts on the Cameo and little help from hubby to figure what should go where and it was done.  It was fun to work on the project with hubby. 

Now we just have to finish the sauce and get ready for a full week of work.  After four weeks of three day weekends, it's going to weird to work all week again. 

Happy Birthday Aunt Margie!

Today is my aunt Margie's birthday.  I won't say how old she is because no one believe me anyway because she looks at least a good 15 years younger than she really is.  I'm just ever so happy to have her in my life and I love even more that I got to spend some time with her today.  I met up with her and my cousin Teresa at my parents' house where we had a little crafting to do.  They are on their way to the Happiest Place on Earth soon.  Earlier this year,  I had bought some autograph book kits for them at the Boxer Scrapbooks warehouse sale but we never got around to getting together to do that.  So it was pretty much now or never. 

Neither of them do a lot of paper crafting so it was great that we had kits to use as the starting point and that didn't stop us from having a good time.   In a very short period of time, we went from paper to book (and they are mighty cute books at that):

So now, on to my gift for my aunt Margie.  I seem to have gotten into a bit of a vinyl kick.  Maybe it's just that I've been able to find acrylic tumblers that don't cost an arm and a leg lately, but I had a bit of fun cutting out this cute Pooh design I found online. 

 

The card I gave her is one I made a while back and featured on my blog here.  It's been hanging on my "card line" on the wall for a while because it's my favorite that I've made so far.  Just something about it really spoke to me. 

 

Well now I have a little time to craft before the hockey game starts.  Hmmm... what should I work on?

Making it my own

Last weekend I watched as my car drove away without me forever.  Yep, it's all over.  My first brand new car is no longer mine after 10 years of it being my baby.  But I know it was the right decision to sell it and buy my Mom's car.  While my car was perfect when I was young and single, Mom's car is a better fit for us now.  But I've been struggling with finding a new normal with the new car.  Even though we've been driving it for nearly a month now, it still feels like "Mom's car."  I've been thinking about what I need to do to make it feel more like my own.  Hubby suggested that I cut another of the Tony Stewart design I had made for the other car, but that just doesn't feel right for this car.  I've been thinking about it for a long time now and sitting at the Winterhawks' game last night when I looked up at the electronic board circling the arena.  

It had the Hawk eyes logo all the way around and it suddenly hit me that the eyes would be a good car "tattoo."  It just seemed right.  So tonight I looked online and discovered that the Hawks don't sell anything even remotely close (nor can I get a replacement license plate holder for the one that broke or a t-shirt as the Western Conference Champions - sigh).  So I found a picture of the eyes and made my own.  While I'm pretty happy with how the eyes turned out, I'm still not sure it's quite right.  But, for now, I'm just going to live with it and see how it feels.

A whole lotta cans!

What a fantastic day! A great, great, great end to the Chase with Tony Stewart winning the race to win the Chase.

But, even better, some very dear friends that I don't see often enough came over to craft for a while. They were making Christmas cards, but since I have mine done already, I thought I would work on this year's gifts for my co-workers. Fortunately none of them read my blog so I can share. Somewhere along the way I either lost two of the cans or maybe I didn't count right, but I need to run to the store to get to more and, of course, the candy to go them. But, yeah!, another project that's oh so close to being crossed off my list.

I also finished up a birthday present for my cousin and started another project, but, of course, those people read my blog, so I can't share.

Waiting impatiently...

I am not a patient person. I accept this about myself. While I love the internet, I'm not an online shopping fan. I hate buying something and then having to wait for it to arrive. I want instant gratification! But sometimes online is the only way to go.

I've had this project idea percolating in my head for a while, well actually I've had several percolating there. Unfortunately, I can't find the supplies I need around town. Argh... so I broke down tonight and ordered online. It all started when I was helping Glenda move her mom in with her today. When we were done, there was no way I was going home to cook, not even if it was something as simple as a Hungry Girl recipe. So we called my parents to see if they were eating out and where so we could join them. While at dinner, my Mom and I started talking about ordering some things online, if I had finally ordered the vinyl that I've been talking about for a while and if I need her 40% off coupon for Craft Warehouse.

Well it got me thinking. It doesn't matter what coupon I have if the stores around me don't carry what I need, so I finally broke down and ordered the vinyl I want online. I found what I wanted at Oh My Crafts (who also happen to have a 10% off coupon right now - the code is summer10). I was going to order six sheets since they had it on sale for $9.99 for all six (what I would pay at full price for two sheets of Cricut vinyl), but then I realized that most of what I wanted was in a bundle of 20 sheets of pre-selected colors for only $14.99 (plus 10% off that - woo hoo!). They had such a great selection and a great price. Even though the shipping is a little spendy, it's still way cheaper than buying the Cricut vinyl even if I had a coupon (plus I'm not so happy with Provocraft over the whole Sure Cuts a Lot/Make the Cut issue so I love that I get my vinyl without having to support the company). But the problem is now I've got to wait a whole week for it to get here and that just isn't working for me. I'm all itchy to get started crafting RIGHT NOW!

What a weekend!

It's been such a fun weekend. Friday night, the hubby took me on a date to see Xmen: First Class. It was good, but it drug in some places. When I have time to start thinking about things about the movie, such as how Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick really do go together as a couple, and if January Jones was pregnant when they were filming this or that came after, you know that they didn't do quite a good enough job.

Then yesterday morning we got up at the time we normally get up for work (no sleeping in, boo), but that was to meet Mom and Dad for breakfast. Then hubby, Dad and I took the boat out fishing. It was about a twelve hour jaunt. They (because I drove the boat all day and hardly ever touched a pole, let alone had the privilege of reeling one in) caught as many as they threw back and we still reached our limit. Those fish are already on their way to the neighbor's smoker, but boy was I tired today.

And speaking of smoke, today I got to play in my craft room (after I cleaned it up) because it's close to the laundry room and I spent a good portion of the day working on the laundry. I've been working on the same page for nearly a week. I "finished" it, but it still doesn't look quite right. So I set it aside to work on another project I've had in mind for a while: replacing my old 20 bumper sticker that we bought at Fontana back in 2007. So it still says Tony Stewart, even though that hasn't been his number for quite some time now. Unfortunately when we went to the race in 2009, they didn't have a bumper sticker (or maybe it was they didn't have one I liked). Anyway, at the Creating Keepsakes Convention (back in February!!!!), I got the idea to cut my own out of vinyl. So today, I searched the Internet high and low for the Clarendon Italic font, which I'm pretty sure is the one for the 14. Well, the only places I could find it wanted over $20 for it. Sorry guys, I'm a cheapskate so that wasn't going to work. So I did a Google Image search and found this one I liked that had the 14 and his nickname Smoke at the bottom. I really liked and the image imported into SCAL beautifully. I was all ready to cut when I flipped back to it for a second and realized that it's a bumper sticker that they are selling now. Well, if I'm going to cut this thing myself, then I want it to be custom, not just something any old person could buy off the web.

So then I flipped over to Tony Stewart's web page and saw that the website had this cool image of the 14 in a circle with flames coming out either side. Now that was cool, but it was in a place where you only get to see it for about two seconds every 20 seconds or so, and you can't copy it. So I grabbed my camera and snapped a picture so I would have a reference point. I started building it myself: number 14 in white taken from first project, check, outline number in black, check, red circle outlined by white circle, check, circle sized so that the letters are just as big as the outline, check. Okay so now flames. Well, since I couldn't grab the image, I was going to have to come up with flames on my own. So back to Google Images. I found some I liked and played with them for a while, but it wasn't quite right. Then I found the half-circle of flames and immediately knew that my image wasn't going to look like the one on the web page, because these flames sparked a new image in my mind of the flames cupping the number. But even then, I knew that I needed something more on the flames. So I went back to the original image I had started with and grabbed the name Smoke and plopped it on top of the solid part of the flames, added a black outline to the name and knew it was perfect. Now this is no bumper sticker. It's my new, original, car tattoo:

A few cuts later, a little cleaning of the back window and on it went. Unfortunately, it was already starting to get dark outside, but I still think the picture came out pretty good.