School is Cool!

This week at the Tiddly Inks Challenge Blog, the challenge was to create a Back to School card. Christy has some wonderful images just perfect for this challenge at the Tiddly Inks store, along with some more fabulous images. She also gifted us last week with a blackboard background paper that came in really handy for this challenge. The image I used is called Schoolgirl, and she's colored with Copics.

The other paper is from Caroline Creations Adorn It, School Academy Collections and is called Girl Academy.

Today I decided to try something I'd never tried before, a tri-fold shutter card. This challenge seemed to call for it. It was a whole lot simpler than I thought, and I really had fun with this one. I found an excellent tutorial at The Craftblog.

The real challenge is to fill all the parts of the card up so there's "flow", and yet not make the card too busy. Thanks to the MTC software and my Cricut, I was able to successfully do that, I think. The apple cut file was a part of the MTC gallery. I used the basic shapes of MTC to make and cut my chalkboard, and then hand wrote the sentiment with a white pen.

One of the neatest things about MTC is that you don't have to cut what you create. You can just print it to your printer. This really comes in handy when what you're cutting is really small and the Cricut just doesn't want to cooperate. I found the freebie for the stack of books with the apple at Christy's Everyday Little Things blog. I used this printing technique to print the file to card stock and then hand cut it. I finished up by adding a deckled rectangle to the back panel and faux stitched around it. It's just perfect for writing that note of encouragement to that schoolgirl.

My card is going to be sent to my cousin's daughter, who is starting her freshman year of college at Auburn. Surely she's not really almost 19 years old and a college freshman. Wasn't it just yesterday when she told me, I was her "other" mother? Well she still feels like my daughter so I'm missing her and want to let her know how proud I am of her.

I appreciate your stopping by and would love to hear from you.