Vicki's Peek-A-Boo Layout

I was lucky enough to attend a weekend crop last weekend, and I was able to get 19 pages done in 2 days! Here is one of my two-page layouts, using my Cricut and my Gypsy. The page base is a tan Bazzill cardstock, and I added some printed paper from my stash to fill the bottom of the page, and the top and center stripes. My photos were mounted on a coordinating sage cardstock.


After I laid out the photos, it was time to add the title and embellishments. On my Gypsy, I used the bracket from the Disney - Hannah Montana cartridge, and welded it to a simple rectangle from George & Basic Shapes, to give it a more solid shape. I cut two of these brackets in the same paper as the top stripe. Since the trees in the photographs was lacking most of its leaves, I selected one of the bare trees from Paper Doll Dress Up. I cut that in a chocolate brown, but it didn't stand out against my printed paper enough, so I cut a large circle from the same shade of paper as my base pages.


The Peek-A-Boo title was welded from the Quarter Note cartridge. If you are looking for a nice script font that welds together easily, this is the cartridge to do it! I used my Zig Glue pen to glue the title to the page. I added a journaling box to balance out the layout, and used the bracket cutouts to highlight both the title and the journaling box.


To make the brackets appear as if they were sewn on the page, I used a brown Sharpie to draw stitch marks on each of them. I also outlined each of the brackets with the same marker, after they were adhered to the page. Finally, to bring more continuity to the page, I wanted to place a dotted line along the sides and bottom of each page. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, and I didn't want my dots to appear too haphazard, so I pulled out my Tim Holtz Design Ruler, which has awesome holes evenly spaced all the way down the ruler. Using a paper piercer, I lightly pierced every other hole all the way around the pages. Then I went back afterwards with marker and placed a dot on each of my piercing marks.

Items from Cutters Creek:
Zig 2-Way Glue Pen
Tim Holtz Design Ruler

Cricut Cartridges: *note - Kim can special order these or any other cartridges you might want!
Paper Doll Dress Up
George & Basic Shapes
Disney - Hannah Montana
Quarter Note

Tutorial Tuesday with Mindy

Hi it’s Mindy and it’s my turn to host Tutorial Tuesday.  We are focusing on stamping this month and I thought I would share one of my favorite stamping techniques- paper piecing.  I used to see cards that were paper pieced and I loved how they looked but I wasn’t quite sure how they were made.  I finally figured it out and I’ve loved it ever since.  To start with you need to pick your image and make sure it has a large enough area to paper piece.  You don’t want to drive yourself crazy when it’s time to cut it out.  Then you need to pick a patterned paper with a pattern that is small enough to repeat inside your area.  Papers with small patterns or 6 x 6 papers are great for this.  For my card I chose to paper piece the egg part of this Tilda stamp.  I started by stamping the image on my white paper. 

Then I stamped the same image on my patterned paper.  I printed a small rectangle on my Imagine and filled it with a pattern from the Hop Scotch cartridge. 

Next I colored the parts of my image that weren’t going to be covered with the paper.  I used copic markers to color Tilda.  Her shirt is a combination of R24, R22, and R20.  Her skin is E02, E00 and E000, and her hair is E37, E35, and YR23.  I also added a little R20 to her cheeks. 

Then I cut out the egg part of the image stamped on the pattern paper.  You need to use some small sharp precision scissors to do this.  It is also good good to cut a little bit inside the stamped line or right on it so that it will fit just inside the part of the image it’s intended to replace when you piece it together.  For this image I needed to cut the bottom and the top half of the egg. This is what my image looked like when I had the bottom of the egg in place.

Finally I glued the top half of the egg in place and assembled my card.  All papers are from the Imagine Hop Scotch cartridge. I hope you have enjoyed my tutorial and that you give paper piecing a try.  It is great to cover large areas you don’t want to color or an easy way to add pattern to an image. 

Cutters Creek Shopping List

Copic sketch markers

Cricut Imagine Hop Scotch cartridge

Happy Easter

I love my Cricut and I look for any excuse to use it.  I thought my new cartridge Kate’s ABC’s would be perfect for an Easter card. 

I picked this sweet little bunny cut and filled all the layers with colors from the Cricut Imagine cartridge Lori’s Garden.  I ran some yellow cardstock through my Cuttlebug and embossed it with one of the folders from the cricut companion sets.  I love how these sets come with a couple 5 x 7 folders.  These work perfectly when you want the entire front of a 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 card embossed like I did here.  I cut this little top note shape, which is one of the stock shapes that comes with the Imagine, and used that to mat my image.  The pattern in the shape is also from Lori’s Garden.  I pop dotted the little bunny and the butterfly up off the background and put little pearls in the center of the flowers.  I finished it off by cutting another Imagine shape in pale yellow and stamping a sentiment on it.  Using your cricut enables you to make some great cards in a relatively short amount of time. 

A Quick and Easy Bunny Card by Mandie - and a WINNER!!!

Today I thought I would share a super simple card that could easily be mass produced! All you need is some cardstock, your Cricut, Zip Dry Paper Glue and some Polar White Flower Soft.


I cut my card base from light pink cardstock at 5" x 10" and folded it in half to make a 5" x 5" card. Then I cut the dark pink layer from the Stretch Your Imagination Cricut Cartridge at 5" from using the Card Frame function. The little bunny is on the same key with a basket. I used my Gypsy to hide the basket in the cut and the layer. I set the size to 2 3/4", then I cut the top layer in white and the bottom in dark pink. I used the Zip Dry Paper Glue to adhere everything because it won't make the paper wrinkle. Then I added some Polar White Flower Soft to his tail so it would be super fluffy!


Here's a closer look at my happy little bunny. You could easily use this card for invitations to an Easter celebration or just as a sweet card to mail out to friends and family!

And now, I'd like to share our WINNER of the March Flower Soft giveaway. As usual, I let Random.org do the hard work and it chose....



Congrats, Dorothy! I will be sending you an email shortly! Thanks to each and every one of our fabulous readers who left wonderful comments throughout the month of March! We really appreciate the support of our readers!!!

Princess Tilda Card by Chris

Have you checked out the new Magnolia Mini Stamps that are now available at the Cutters Creek store? They are all mini versions of the original Magnolia stamps and they fit perfectly on the A2 card size!


Love these minis! I decided to try the bleaching method to make my background. I put a small amount of bleach in a Pyrex dish and folded a paper towel into it to absorb the bleach. I then used that as my stamp pad and stamped the image on my red cardstock. (A tip from Lori: Be sure your cardstock is a solid core piece and not one where the color is printed on — e.g., Core'dinations, Worldwin, CTMH.) It took a few tries before I got a good image. At first I had too much bleach and it just ran and bled out the image, and then, I did too little and got only part of an image, so I suggest practicing on scraps before moving to the cardstock you want to use.


Also be sure to wash the bleach off the stamp immediately after using. Once that was dry I glued it onto a 10x5 base folded to a 5x5 inch card and rounded the corners using my Corner Chomper.

I then stamped the Mini Princess Tilda with Memento Black Ink twice. I colored one using my Copics and the other I cut just inside the outside edge to use as a mask later.
Skin: E21, E00, E50
Hair: E07, R14, YR23
Crown: Y28 and Gold atyou Spica
Dress: Y23, Y21 (Note to get the medium color here I picked up Y23 with my Y21 pen and shaded.)
Bodice Trim, Slip, and Socks: YG21, YG23
Shoes: E31, E33, E34
Using my Nestabilities Classic Scallop Oval Small Set I cut and embossed Tilda. Using removable tape I placed my Tilda mask over the colored Tilda while it was still in my Nestability. I then used some Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Mustard Seed and a stipple brush to color the background by pouncing the brush up and down over the image.


Using my Spellbinders Beaded Oval Set I cut and embossed the larger layer and used red pearl pens to give some dimension to every other oval. Once dry I stacked the two ovals and adhered them to the card base. The smaller oval was raised with pop its. Finally, I added a small bow using Glue Dots.

Tutorial Twofer Tuesday with Lori

Stamping Your Own Patterned Paper AND Masking

Happy Tuesday everyone, and welcome to our first installment of Tutorial Tuesday for April!  This month we're focusing on stamping, and since I am the self-proclaimed Simple Stamping Guru, I'm jumping right in with two easy techniques today.  Initially, I was just going to focus on making your own custom patterned paper, but I needed to mask an image for my card anyway, and since it's an easy yet oh-so-useful technique, I just added it right in.  Trust me, I don't like doing things that are "hard", require a lot of products, or take a lot of time.  So, make yourself comfortable and see for yourself how easy stamping can be!

Let's start with a technique called "random stamping" to make your own patterned paper.  It's really a misnomer, as it's not random at all, but when you're done it certainly looks that way.  This is such a useful technique, for times when you don't want to search for the "right" paper for a project, or just don't have something in the right colors.  I have been known to be slightly obsessive (OK, maybe not slightly) about my papers matching my pictures in my scrapbook pages; to the extent of making my own patterned papers that match the clothes my kids are wearing in the pictures.  But that's a story for another day...

I'm making a card, because the smaller size makes it easier to learn the technique.  (If any of the pictures are too small for you, just click on them to see them larger.)  To begin, stamp a single image near the center of your paper.  I stamped right on my 5 x 7 card base, choosing to make my entire background patterned.  For this project, I am using a single stamp for my pattern, but as you practice, you can add more stamps, and/or rotate the stamp(s) for more variety.

Next, stamp the image twice more, forming a triangle shape with the three images.  I chose to keep my images all facing the same general direction, but you can rotate for a different effect.

Continue stamping images, creating more and more triangles on your paper.  Make sure that when you approach the edges that you allow the images to go off the edges of the paper where they would naturally fall.  (Ever notice that patterned paper you buy doesn't usually contain only whole images, that shapes run off the edges of the paper?)

Since I used a line drawn stamp, I chose to color my images with Copic markers.  I colored using a very informal style, freely going outside the lines, as it was easy to color each petal and leaf by simply laying the brush tip against the paper for each one.

Don't worry about making your image spacing or your coloring perfect.  Trust me, no one will notice when you're done!  Now, on to masking:

This technique allows you to group images together, making them look like one is in front of another.  There is no limit to the number of images you can combine into a scene, but I most commonly use only two images together.  It looks so much more "advanced" when you mask than if you just stamp the images next to each other.  The only additional supply needed is a Post-It note (or if you don't have any, use a piece of printer paper and adhesive tape.

First, stamp the image you want to appear in the front of your scene on your cardstock.  Then stamp it again on your Post-It note.

Cut out the image you stamped on your Post-It, and stick it directly on the image you stamped on cardstock.

Next, stamp the other image right next to the first, slightly overlapping where you want it to appear behind the first image.

Peel off the Post-It note, and voila! You have a masked scene.  For my purposes, I cut out my masked images, added some extra detail and colored them.

To assemble my card, I also stamped and colored a border and cut it out.  I trimmed 1/4" off the right edge and adhered my border image and some ribbon.  Then I popped up my stamped image on a matted panel, added a custom sentiment, and DONE!

I thought this would make a great card for a  couples shower, casual wedding, or a fun anniversary card.  Just add the additional sentiment to the inside of the card and you're ready to roll.

Products available at Cutters Creek:

• Clear Art Stamps from Crafty Secrets, Kitchen Classics
• Acrylic Block starter set
• Memento Ink, black
• Copic Markers, in R20 Blush and YG07 Acid Green
• Cardstock

Design Team Update!

As with all things in life, there are always changes going on around us.  Cutters Creek has been very blessed to have some wonderful designers join our team and they always make me so very proud.  Starting April 1st, I have a brand new member to the Cutters Creek Design Team.  She has let me share show so many of her projects as a Guest Designer, I just had to ask if she would like to join my team.  So everyone welcome Deanna to our Team!  I am so excited to see more of her creations along the way.

I would be remiss, if I didn't mention another new member who has been with us since March 1st.  Mindy is now a part of our team as well and has already been dazzling us with her creations this month.  I have been a fan of her work for quite some time and am so pleased she is on our team as well. 

We are now a full and well rounded Design Team with eight lovely ladies!  Our Head Design Team Leader is Mandie and our other members are Vicki, Chris, Laura, Lori, & Melissa.  Keep following what they do, as they are always coming up with great projects that are just dazzling!  I think this month, they are going to be inking up some stamps and as this is not my forte, I am looking forward to their tricks and tips this month and our Tutorial Tuesdays!  Stay tuned........................