The one tool every papercrafter needs...

It's starting to become quite a tradition to make a card on Friday night. I'm becoming addicted to watching Creations with Christina's Stampin' on Friday videos. The cards are always so cute and inspirational. Now usually I don't have the products she shows and today was no exception. I don't have the cute little ticket die or the stamps, so I made a ticket using Sure Cuts a Lot. Once I had the basic outline made, I copied it, shrunk, put the new image on it's own layer, and used the program to center the smaller one in the middle of the bigger one. I then drew the smaller outline using my Cri-kits pens and then cut the larger outline to get my "ticket." I chose the word from the "Warm Words" collection from Stampin' Up because I need a thank you card to send to a woman who provided us a lot of help in a recent project at work. I used the paper scraps from the birthday card for my mother-in-law last weekend, and some plain grosgrain ribbon I picked up at Dollar Tree. So, unlike how nice Christina's looked, mine still looked a little plain to me, which is odd because normally I really like a plain style. But this time, it needed something. So I added a mat with DCWV card stock, a little pierced line using my Stampin' Up paper piercer and added some Cotton Candy Stickles to the centers of the big flowers.

Now it looked better, but something just wasn't right, which brings me to the one tool every paper crafter needs: the Cricut Spatula. Now you may be thinking, really? I don't even have a Cricut. Or maybe, I have a Cricut but I rarely use the spatula. How can it be that important?

Well let me ask you this: Have you ever taped down a piece of paper on your project and realized it's not straight at all or you don't really like it there only to discover that the paper has adhered enough that you can't really move it? Okay so you all may be perfect, but it happens to me all the time. Like tonight on this card where I realized that what was wrong was the ribbon knot was too messy looking. Of course that meant I have to take up the paper. So I slipped the thin blade of the spatula under the paper and used the blade to separate the mat from the patterned paper. The tape sticks to the spatula and can easily be rubbed off the metal surface (you can still see a little on my spatula in the picture since I hadn't really cleaned it yet). It worked like a charm and I've done it probably hundreds of time now. Once they were apart, I tied the ribbon again to get a neater knot and then re-taped the paper with my ATG gun.

So that's it. Now I'm happy with it.