Fun with die cutting

As I mentioned in my previous post, I finally bought myself a die cutting machine.  Meanwhile, a friend of mine had been wondering if I ever make cards which don't have any text on them, just plain designs.  This circle burst die I thought would be perfect for such a thing, so I made a few blank note cards with it:

(Again, I don't know what I did with my camera.  In the interest of just getting the pics up here, I'm not going to try to find out. :)

In an awesome coincidence, one of my favorite stamp companies, Avery Elle, started making dies the same week I bought my die cutting machine!  Here are a couple of those:

And here's a "fun with embossing" card, the layout which I believe came from the Clean and Simple 2 class over at Online Card Classes.

I have one more post to share with you today, so read on, and thanks for visiting!

Mix tape cards

Hi!  It's been a busy week or two over at Gabi's house of unemployed card making.  First of all, it was my birthday so I finally broke down and bought myself a die cutting machine.  I got a Big Shot, and I love it.  The learning curve of how to use it was actually a longer process than I expected, but in general, I really like to cut things, so of course a machine that does just that is right up my alley.  More on that and some cards I made with it later.

First, though, I had run out of ideas, so I asked some friends on Facebook to tell me their favorite songs to put on mix tapes.  I had a really cute stamp of a cassette tape that I bought from Drumchick Designs on Etsy,  and I was itching to use it.  I used their song suggestions and ran with them, and here's what I came up with.  I'm really proud of this series, they're all CAS and really fun.  (Plus, I got to use some new stamps and a do a little die cutting.)

I apologize in advance for these pictures being so dark, I must have been using the wrong setting on my camera and right now it's too late at night for me to bother with taking them again.

This first one is actually MY favorite song to put on a mix tape, "Livin' on a Prayer."  This is the only card I was able to get away with hand-lettering!  After many attempts at hand-writing some of the other cards, I finally relented and printed out the sentiments.  (Which I hate doing, because I hate pulling out the computer and futzing with the printer if I'm in the middle of paper crafting.)

It turns out my friends were really into the Bangles when we were young - I got requests for "Manic Monday," "Walk Like an Egyptian," and "Eternal Flame."  This next one is the only one that made it into the repertoire, partly because I just couldn't, in good conscience, put "Walk Like an Egyptian" on a greeting card!

I did agree to put "I Will Survive" on a card instead of "Walk Like an Egyptian":  (I got to use my Big Shot for this one!)

These next two are my favorites from this series.  My BFF Merav chose "La Isla Bonita" as her song, so I ran with the beach-y theme.  (Though everybody knows "Like a Prayer" is the best Madonna song.)

The first one is really CAS, the second one got a little more involved.  (There are cartoon fish involved!)

One more: "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

CAS-ual Fridays Challenge, #90

I made this card with extra paper stuff I had lying around, and I wanted to enter it into the CAS-ual Fridays Challenge.  This is week's theme is "black and white +1," meaning black and white with one color.  Here goes:

     

Thanks for reading!