Paper Pennant Garland

One of the things I love most about my son's new room are the paper banners I created.

Here is how I made them...

Cut the the layers out on my cricut, red background layer (which if you look closely you'll see also has an oval cut out to help me thread them evenly), the white layer and then the blue letters.

Then I assembled the individual banners:

Then I flipped them over to reveal the guide on the red layer that was cut by the Cricut so that each pennant would have their slits cut in exactly the same spot - what I tried and discovered didn't work was to precut the slit in both layers.

Why didn't that work? First, lining the two slits up perfect was a challenge, and second, the cricut couldn't get the slit as narrow as I wanted it - too wide of a slit and the pennants slide around on the ribbon and gravity is not the friend of the garland. 

So I cut them by hand. 

And then I threaded them onto the ribbon, first trying and not liking them on white, then loving them on red. 

And that was it - 3 fabulous custom paper pennant garlands for his room.

New Orleans Inspired Vase

One of the things I loved in New Orleans was the iron works. I decided to bring a little of that to our house with the help of my cricut, some vinyl and a vase.

I started with this image from our trip:

Then I created a version of the pattern on my computer:

And sent it over to the cricut:

After the cutting completed I weeded out the negative spaces:

Then I removed the backing from contact paper:

And then burnished it down on top of the remaining vinyl.

After the contact paper was secured to the vinyl I pulled up both layers releasing the vinyl from it's backing.

The two layers were applied to the vase and then burnished so that the vinyl transferred to the vase.

And finally pulled off the contact paper and secured any lose edges of the vinyl to the vase.

So now I've got a fabulous little vase that reminds me of our trip.

Spider Vase

Another holiday season another version of the vase, the very simple vase that I picked up 6 of on clearance at AC Moore for $2.

I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

Here is what I started with:

Materials:

• $2 Ceramic Vase
• Black vinyl
• Paper Doll Dress Up Cart

Step 1 - Cut several spider webs at a variety of sizes.

Step 2: Weed out the portions of the design that you won't need.

Until you've revealed the spider web.

Repeat with the others.

Step 3 - Apply to the clean vase.

Then add the others...

Final little detail, my little spider friend.

The finished piece:

 

$2 Etched Beer Mugs

Not sure if there are going to birthday gifts for my mom and stepdad or Christmas gifts, either way, they are done and I'm happy with the way they turned out.

Materials:

• Beer Mugs - found at Dollar Tree, so each of them were only a $1. 
• Etching Cream
• Paint brush
• Vinyl or contact paper

Step 1 - Cut the vinyl however you like, either by hand or with something like a cricut and apply the vinyl to the glass.

Step 2 - Liberally brush on the etching cream & let set well past what they tell you to. 

Step 3 - Rinse off the cream and remove the vinyl.

Step 4 - Clean off any adhesive or other residue and you're good to go.

Double Stars

My creative mind couldn't stop at just the 3-d stars... I wanted to find a way to make double stars, stars that were puffed out on both sides.

I figured all the stars needed were some tabs on the outside edges.

So I created the little template on my computer:

Kind of looks more like a snow flake doesn't it?

Bear with me, I promise it will turn into a double sided star here shortly.

So with the template I could have either printed it on decorative paper, or done like I did which was to export this file as an SVG and then cut it using my Cricut.

I scored the back of 2 of the stars, along the tabs and along the point to the center as I did in my earlier project. This time I actually used a scoring tool - fancy dancy. I also made note that I score the lines that I wanted to be a peak, on the wrong side, and the lines that I wanted to be a valley on the right side. Something I forgot to note in the first project.

Then I folded everything making sure the tabs were folded wrong side together.

Ta-daaaa!

Now, we could have stopped here and glued the stars to a flat piece of paper if that is what we were going for. But it wasn't...

So I kept going. Next was to apply glue to the tabs of the stars.

Then line up the points of the left side and the right side and pinch together.

You have to be a little patient while waiting for the glue to catch before moving to the next point of the star.

But when you're done - you've got this, a double sided 3 d-star.

I kept on cutting, scoring, folding, gluing over and over 'till I had these:

Our little patriotic jar of stars...

And since I've got the template I can cut these on my cricut on any paper, anytime and at any size... I'm thinking metalic papers at the holidays... run some string or twine in between for lovely ornaments. Maybe by then I'll have a toy to emboss the papers too.