Hey ladies! It's Papertrey release night and as I'm hanging out here I thought I'd right up a post answering some questions you've been asking lately. So...here we go....
1. First some general project/product questions....
- Music paper: I had several of you ask about the green music paper on this card. It is from the Making Memories Mistletoe collection. It's glitter and pretty and one of my favorites. Note to self: Get MORE. :-)
- Fabric snowflakes: I had lots of you ask how I did the fabric snowflakes on this card. They are from the new Winter Woodland Cricut cartridge and I cut them using my Cricut like this...
- Cutting fabric with your Cricut: I iron my fabric to Ultra Heat n' Bond (make sure it's the ultra...it's the only one that makes your fabric stable enough!). After you iron it onto the backside of your fabric, just peel away the paper backing and stick your fabric right onto your Cricut cutting mat....Heat n' Bond side down of course. The Heat n' Bond gives it a kind of plasic-like coating and it will stick right to your mat. Then just cut away...use settings similar to what you would use for cardstock and make sure you're using a fairly sticky mat and a fairly new blade. It's fun...you'll be hooked once you try it!!
- Favorite Cricut Cartridges: A few of you have asked about this as well. Hmmm...there are so many it's hard to choose. It depends on the day, and the project and can change from minute to minute, but in general, some of my very favorite and most used cartridges are Storybook, Home Accents, Home Decor, Joys of the Season, Graphically Speaking, Wild Card,Lyrical Letters, Winter Woodland and A Child's Year
- The embossing on my Cummumique cards: No real secret here, the embossing continues onto the backside of my card. I finished off the front edge with one of the border embossers. To emboss the borders without getting that annoying line from the edge of the folder, I put a strip of fun foam just slighty smaller than the embossing folder like this (permanently attached with a strip of ScorTape so they're ready to go whenever I want to use them)...
and run it thorugh my Cuttlebug with this stack (from the bottom up): A plate, a cardstock shim(3 sheets), my folder with the cardstock inside, C plate.

Run it through and you won't have any of those annoying little lines from your folder.

- The masking on my Home Made card: Stamp the window onto your project and onto a post-it note or scrap paper.

Cut out the inside of the window stamped on the scrap paper, just inside the frame.

Place this over the image on your projects and stamp the flowers.

Pull off the mask and your flowers are neatly inside the window frame. Easy peasy. :-)

2. Photos. I've had a few of you ask what kind of camera I have, program I use, etc.
- Camera: I have a Nikon D50. I've had it for about 3 1/2 years and I still love it. My favorite lens is my 50mm 1.8. It's pretty inexpensive as fas as lenses go and it gets really great, sharp photos even in fairly low light without using the flash. It stays on my camera 95% of the time and it's what I use to photograph all of my projects.
- Photo editing program: I use PSE 7.0 I would highly recommend it...it's pretty easy (but powerful) to learn... there are tons of on-line tutorials to get you going if you struggle at first.
- Photo actions: I love to use Coffee Shop Photoshop Actions on my photos. She's got some great ones for color pop, black and white, vingnettes, etc. etc.
Ok, so that was a lot of info and ended up being way longer than I expected. Yay for you if you actually read that all. :-)
So, I'll leave you with a few photos...I posted some photos of my baby girl the other day, and since fair is fair, I'll post a couple of my older two. :-) Let's just say that their school photos were a bit scarey and I decided to take them out last Saturday and shoot some of my own....love these so much more...their personalities come shining through. Unlike the school shots. yikes. I have a funny story about that...might have to share that on another day.
These are a few of my favorites. And btw, I used Coffee Shop's Color Pop and Burn actions on these...

And just one of the dude...he was a sport, but didn't enjoy it nearly as much as his sister. :-)
Goodnight! Be back later with my Papertrey projects for the month! yipppeee!