Thursday, March 14, 2013

BBTB2 Challenge - Bring on the Bunnies

This week's Bitten by the Bug 2 challenge is "Bring on the Bunnies" - use a bunny from any Cricut cartridge.

For this challenge, I knew that I wanted to use my absolute favorite bunny cut - Thumper from the Disney Classic Cricut cartridge.  Throughout my life, I have had several bunnies as pets and this Cricut cut reminds me so much of them.  At one point I had 5 house bunnies; 3 were adopted from the local humane society and the Wisconsin House Rabbit Society.  Bunnies are very intelligent creatures - they can be litter box trained and they love to hop around and play with toys.

Now, on to my card.  Thumper was cut at 1.5" and popped up on the card using foam squares.  The circles were cut from Cricut Craft Room Basics.  Isn't Thumper just precious?!?!




Below are some pictures of my bunnies.

Tolstoy and Copernicus (Copper for short)

Clover - Mini Lop

Dusty - Blue Dutch pedigreed

Bugsy - Mini Rex

Harvey (short for Harvard) - Mini Lop

Monday, March 11, 2013

School Project - Ask the Expert Fair

Hi Everyone!

Sorry I haven't posted for a while.  My daughter has had some 2nd grade school projects that needed some of my time.

Today I'm going to share with you her project for tomorrow.  Her school is having an Ask the Expert Fair.  This is a voluntary event for the 2nd and 3rd graders.  The child comes up with a topic that they needed to submit in advance and then they have a few weeks to put together a presentation board on their topic.  The board will be up in the gym all day tomorrow for the kids to see and from 4:30-5:30P parents can come to see the boards and ask the kids questions on their topic.  

My daughter's topic is "Cats are Love Bugs."  She came up with this idea entirely on her own and she wanted to use pictures of our cats as part of the project.  Of course there are always school rules - no liquid, no candy, no live animals, no food, etc.  These completely ruined my idea of having candy at the booth to attract people to come and ask her questions.  So, our next idea was to give out bookmarks.  "We" made the bookmarks by hand (which really means that I ended up doing this part), including the tassels which are made with crochet thread.

We even added lights to the board and a sound recorder that has a 30 second introduction that she recorded.  It is great to see her so excited about her project.  She already has bigger and better ideas for next year!

The font is from Cindy Loo and popped up with foam squares.




Dinah (Alice in Wonderland's Cat) was cut at 11" and mounted on 3 base layers for added stability.  Dinah is freestanding and not adhered to the board.

Figaro was cut at 7.77" high (11.5" in length).  His body was cut out of dark brown suede paper from Hot off the Press ($1.99 for an 8.5X11" sheet at J's) and I used white flocking powder on the tip of his tail and around his mouth.  I also used 3 base layers here for stability and popped him up from the board with foam squares.

Edited to add how I cut the suede paper on the cricut:  I used a new blade and a very sticky mat.  I place the suede paper with the paper backing on the mat - suede side up.  I used a pressure of 4, multi-cut 2.  Since I used my gypsy for the cut, I did not do anything with the speed setting (left it at 4) as it always cuts at the same speed for me with the gypsy regardless of the machine setting. 


Below is a picture of the front and back of the bookmarks.  I was able to tie 6 tassels an hour - to which my daughter replied, "why can't you tie 10 an hour, then it will only take you 10 hours to make 100."  LOL.  I ended up getting about 30 of them done.