This time next week

I will be part of the first ever Card Cupids blog hop! (also, my first blog hop of any sort). There's going to be a big prize to enter for that the entire design team is contributing to, so be sure to come back and hop along for a chance to win! It will be a fun time and we'll all be sharing a Christmas card creation.

Here's a sneak peek at what I've contributed to the big grand prize:See you next Friday!

Adventures in Quilling

After having this tutorial by Reese Dixon bookmarked for a year, I finally decided to take the plunge and attempt quilling. I'm in a ornament exchange, and that snowflake is just the thing I was looking for to wow my recipient.
Unfortunately, none of the (two) craft stores in my area had quilling tools. So, I took a large sewing needle and clipped off the ends with a wire cutter. You'll see in my snowflake that it didn't work all that well and the ends of my spirals are wrinkled...but that being said, I LOVE my snowflake! I plan to spray adhesive on it and glitter it up like Reese did.
I plan to make many many more of these. It really didn't take me very long (after the initial cutting of the paper strips) and it was surprisingly fun. And you really can't beat the wow factor of quilling.
And you'll be pleased to know I ordered some quilling tools from amazon.com, and they should be here by this weekend, so my exchange recipient will be getting some unwrinkled snowflakes :)

Card for Nina

Nina is an 10 year old foster child with a birthday coming up. I made this happy little pig card to send to her.

I'll be mailing off Nina's card tomorrow, along with these, all for the Children's Hospital at Legacy Emanuel in Portland Oregon.
Want to be a Card Cupid too? Send your handmade cards to

Card Cupids
C/O Stephanie

13203 Overcup Oak Court, Apt 201

Herndon, VA 20171

We're have an ongoing deal with the Legacy Emanuel Children's hospital, and they need cards for any event, so if you have more than you know what to do with, please consider clearing out your stash and making a child's day!

Adding to my stash

I was so excited to pick up my package of cuttlebug folders from the post office yesterday, but unfortunately it was a crazy day at work and I didn't get to play with them. Today after work, they were the first thing I reached for!


I plan to send in a stack of plain Christmas cards to Card Cupids for the hospital, so I made this little card using the snowflake cuttlebug folder, my texture boutique, sandpaper, glitter glue, and paper embellishments.
The little trees came in a jar of paper embellishments that my mom bought me to use for the Card Cupid project :) Thanks Mama, I'm sure I'll find lots of uses for them!

Card Cupids announcement

I'm so very proud to announce that I'm now a member of the Card Cupids Design Team! Card Cupids is a brand new organization that sends bundles of cards to needy children who can use some cheering up, how sweet is that?!

Please be sure to go over to the Card Cupids blog and check out the other talented ladies that make up our design team, and I hope you'll play along with our challenges and participate in any way you can!

Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate Cupcakes

Have you tried the Salted Caramel Hot Chocolates at Starbucks yet? If not, you should probably go get one right now. I'll wait.
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If you're like me, you're now addicted to these tasty treats. I don't know why they're SO stinking good!!
Last weekend we were having friends over for a horror movie marathon, and I knew I wanted to make salted caramel something. I settled on mini cupcakes after finding the beautiful TasteSpotting and sorting the recipes by the "salted caramel" tag.
I made the salted caramel buttercream from this recipe, and I highly recommend! For one, it was really, really easy. For two, it was so good!
For the cupcakes, I cheated. I used a box milk chocolate cake mix, and substituted strong brewed coffee for the water. They don't taste like coffee, but for some reason I felt that it would be more of a hot chocolate tasting cupcake, and I was happy with the result.

Cards for Christina and Riley

These are two more cards for Card Cupids, for 3 year old Christina and 10 year old Riley.



If you look closely, you'll see that the Dog's tag even has a teeny little "R" on it :)




I hope these bring a smile to their faces! I'll be dropping my three cards in the mail, but if you're interested in submitting a card you have until November 10 for Ashlie and Christina and November 17 for Riley.

one card, three purposes

First and foremost, this card is for Ashlie. If you haven't heard of Card Cupids yet, you should check out their blog. It's a very sweet project designed to brighten sick childrens' hospital stays, and I think it's just wonderful. Normally I'd use some glitter glue on a card like this, but since I'm not sure if it would be allowed, I left it off this time.

Second, I'm entering this card in Momo's Tuesday challenge! This week's challenge was to use some sort of embossing, so I used my Sizzix texture boutique and the Sizzix tropical paisley embossing folder to add texture to my purple square.

Third, and finally, I'm entering this card into the MAG challenge! This week's challenge was to use page 45 of the Create a Critter Cartridge, and page 45 only. I was excited to see this challenge as Create a Critter is one of only 3 cartridges I own, so I could actually participate this week! YAY!

While Ashlie was the inspiration to make a card, the two challenges made me use cuts and techniques I may not have. This was a really fun way to create a card, and I really hope it does make Ashlie smile ;)

Two things

1. I just discovered the most beautiful...blog? community? I'm not sure what it is, but I am in love. It's called Taste Spotting. It's very visually beautiful, but the recipes, oh the recipes! I haven't tried any yet, but you better believe I'm starting a list. And it will be long.

2. I have to laugh at the kind of google hits that my blog gets around Halloween. The combination of "pumpkin" and "butts" makes me pop up on some funny searches. A few from the last couple of days:
Fat Pumpkin Butts
Pumpkin Carvings of Butts
Pumpkins shaped like Butts
Pumpkins with Butts
Pictures of pumpkin butts
pumpkin pie with butt


Maybe I'm the only one that finds that funny, and I'm sure that this post will result in more weird search results, but that's part of the fun in having a blog hit tracker :)

Happy Friday!

Thanksgiving Card

I made this simple little card for the Cricut Cardz Challenge, #48 which is to make a card for Thanksgiving. I have very few sentiment stamps, so I covered up part of a stamp that said "Thanks you're sweet" so that I could just have it say Thanks. Ideally, I'd have liked it to say "Give Thanks"...but I do what I can :)

The cardbase is from Plantin Schoolbook (I don't know that it's a card "feature", but a card was one of my button options. Is that the same thing?), leaves are cut from the Create a Critter at 2 3/4 inches, the brown craft paper is from my stash, the rest is from Stampin' Up. The brads are from JoAnns.

I embossed the orange leaf with my new toy:


Sizzix Texture Boutique! I love it! I only have two folders right now (8 more are in the mail!). It's not funny how quickly I'm outgrowing my craft space. There are just so many fun things out there right now.

The winniest weekend ever!

Winniest is not a word, but I think it needs to be! Last week, I entered into several blog hop contests and contests to win Pink ATG guns, and, much to my surprise I won THREE of the contests (not three ATG's :)! I haven't won anything since April, so to win three in a week was a thrill to say the least :)

The first contest was held by Scotch ATG, and I won this pink ATG gun. I've been using it for a few days, and I can't say enough good things about it. I adore it. It seems like it would be bulky, but it's really not once you get the hang of it. And you don't have to press down to release the adhesive at all (which you have to with tombo mono rollers-and it often left lines in my paper). Love.

The second contest was by Helen, over at craftingcricutmom <--click for her blog! The contest was also to win a Pink ATG, but then she decided to draw a name for a bonus gift, and that was me! I received her package today and this is what it contained: Thank you so much, Helen! Everything is so fun, and I couldn't wait to use the Christmas stamps, so today I made my first Christmas card:


I love that my stash is getting to the point where I have everything I need to make my ideas come to life, it's so fun.

The third contest was over at Scrapping Sweets By Abby <-- click for her blog! The contest was to win a Brown and pink Cricut apron, and I won! We also learned that we only live 40 minutes from each other, and Abby had taken a trip to my middle of nowhere town just a few days before the contest. What are the chances?! I'll add a picture of my apron as soon as it arrives.

so that concludes my winnigest week ever! I hope you all get a chance to check out Helen and Abby's blogs, they are both really creative ladies full of good ideas. Have a great week! (I hope it's winny too.)

Something other than a card

I've been trying to think of ways to use my cricut to make something other than cards. (I'm addicted to card making right now, though!)
Since Halloween is coming, I've been focusing on that. I decided I wanted to make some luminaries to line my sidewalk up to my door step for Halloween night (assuming it doesn't rain!). These are what I came up with:And the best part? They won me an ATG gun! I'll have to tell you about that in a another post, though, because this has been the winniest week ever for me and I can't wait to share my prizes.


I also have these mirrors from Ikea in my entryway, and I cut a bunch of shapes from Pumpkin Carvings at 3" to go in each mirror. I love them! I think I'll be changing out the cuts for each holiday this season, because I love the effect. It's very hard to take a picture of a mirror, so you'll have to trust me that it looks much cuter in real life.


And then I used the leftover face cuts from my mirror cutouts to decorate my mini pumpkins for Halloween. I always keep my mini pumpkins up through Thanksgiving, so I didn't want to permanently alter them, and I think this works perfectly.

So, that's what I've been up to!

ETA: sorry for the horrid pictures! It's dark by the time I get home, so with that comes terrible pictures until Spring :)

3 year old birthday card

I made this sweet little card for my nephew PJ, who will be three next month. Where the heck does time go?! It seems like just yesterday I was hogging all his baby cuddles and listening to him grunt and try to figure out the world.

Everything except for the 3 is from Create a critter, the 3 is from Plantin Schoolbook. Since there was so much going on with the train I had a hard time coming up with a background, so I settled for plain blue stripes. The bear and the 3 are pop-dotted from the page.

Since PJ is only 3, I guess this card is more for his mama (my sister), who also just got her first cricut a few days before I did! They live 500 miles away but someday maybe we'll be able to have a crafty get together! A girl can dream.

I've discovered so many new wonderful blogs this week that I haven't taken the time to post on my own. I just love the cricut community I've stumbled upon, everyone is so creative and supportive. It's just so much fun.

Hope you all are having a wonderful week!

Create a Critter!

Yesterday the mailman arrived bearing gifts:


Just in time for World Card Making Day! I'm so excited about this cartridge. To say I love it would be an understatement, I'm obsessed! It really does have a cutesy critter for every holiday and event. Love!

I made the two purple and pink cards yesterday, and the turkey today. If my Cricut mat hadn't lost all of it's sticky I'd still be holed up in my room today, but alas, I'm waiting for it to dry now (and crossing my fingers it gets sticky again!)

This is the last cartridge I'll be buying for awhile, at least until 2011. I have four now and I don't think I'll ever get to use all of the images I have!

Hope you're all having a wonderful weekend! I tried to send this post using my phone, but it failed. Pretty sure someone in my area code with a phone number that spells out "BLOGGER" is going to be very annoyed with me :)

Two Tier Cake

This is the first thing I get to cross off of my 25 before 25 list! and, I can safely say that I am not good at this, and have no desire to attempt it again, and this is good to know!

The top smaller cake is lemon cake, using this recipe. (just the cake, not the ganache) I put a layer of plain chocolate ganache in the middle and on the top of the cake and frosted it with my favorite chocolate mousse frosting (which is a BAD idea for a cake you're going to cover with fondant! The frosting slipped out the bottom of the fondant and made it lumpy and wrinkly).

The bottom layer is my black magic cake, also with a layer of ganache in the middle and on top and with the chocolate mousse frosting. It was divine! It was moist and rich and so delicious. I was happy with that.

I also didn't flatten the top of my bottom tier, so when I stacked the smaller tier on top there was a big fat gap between the two cakes! That's why my pink "ribbon" is folded around the middle of the cake.

So my first (and most likely ONLY) two tier cake was a little lumpy and lopsided, but it was tasty and a good experience. One I will NOT be attempting again!


Chocolate Ganache (adapted from several recipes)
1 c. heavy cream
12 oz bag semi sweet chocolate chips
2 tbs unsalted butter

Bring cream and butter to a boil, remove from heat, pour in chocolate chips and let sit for 5 minutes. Stir until smooth and cool to room temperature. So easy!