Barb Wire Crawl - Spartan Shadowbox

 

I love it when I am able to combine two of my hobbies together, and if you've been following my blog for any period of time you've probably noticed.  Even though it might take me a bit to get my shadowboxes completed after a race I still get them done....

 

Today's shadowbox is from the Spartan Sprint that I ran with my oldest daughter and her boyfriend this past March in Atlanta.  It was the boyfriend's first, my daughter's second and my third Spartan. 

 

 

 

This year featured several new obstacles and that presented it's own set of challenges.  Not to mention that this was my first race since completing physical therapy for a shoulder impingement that had me reduced to about 30% mobility.

 

Needless to say, I wasn't worried about time - then again I never am.  I just get out there to have fun, challenge myself and do it safely.  And I am happy to say that I was able to do every obstacle with the exception of the rope climb, but what else is new there? 

 

Back to my shadowbox though......for this one I decided to use a picture from my barb wire crawl.  I'm not sure what the distance was for this year's section but it was broken up in two parts this year and each section was full of the typical mud, bumps and fun.

 

To compliment the picture I chose to showcase I used the following files:

 

• Dark Barbed Wire from the Cricut cartridge Old West.  This had a small section and I needed a longer one so I welded together four of the sections to create the length needed.
• Girl in the tire (without the tire) from the Mud Run file by Marjorie Ann Designs.  Since I was crawling through the mud I wanted my girl to do the same so I cut a small slit in the 'mud' that I could fit my girl into so as to give her the look of doing the same.

So why do I run these crazy races you ask?  Aren't I too old?  Absolutely not!  You're never too old to do what you enjoy.   And well I do them because I want....

 

 

 

Happy Fall Ya'll

 

Today I have a Fall card that I want to share with you.  Yep, no holiday theme today, just a plain fun Fall season card.

 

For this one I used this great Snoopy scarecrow that I received during a recent SVG Cutting Files blog hop.  I'm telling you guys if you have a machine that does SVG files and you aren't participating in these blog hops you are missing out BIG TIME. .............  Jumping off my 'soap box' now.  LOL

 

Since Snoopy is a scarecrow I wanted to add some hay bales in to the pic and used these bales from the Old West cartridge. 

 

To finish off my card I used this great sentiment from the recently released Hey Pumpkin stamp set by Craftin Desert Divas.

 

I'm going to enter this card in to the following challenges:

 

Fall Colors - Hiding in My Craft Room - Ends November 8th

 

Anything Goes - Fantabulous Cricut Challenge - Ends November 9th

 

Anything Goes - DL Art - Ends November 30th

 

Marley & Me (use an animal) - Red Carpet Studios - Ends November 15th

Father's Day Pocket Card

With Father's Day only 12 days away I figured I best get a move on and start making my cards.  So far I have two of the three I need done and this is the first one I'd like to share with you. 

My inspiration for this card was found in the pages of the May/June edition of Paper Crafts Magazine. (Check out their blog.)  The original version used dies from papertrey  ink and quickutz but I used my trusty 'ol Cricut:

Old West was used for the pocket.  I hid the little design on the pocket and I also cut a small rectangle to adhere to the top edge of the pocket as my 'flap'.

Graphically Speaking was used for the paper which I also embossed using the argyle cuttlebug folder.

Life's a Party was used for the glasses.  After cutting out the pieces I ran the face piece through my Xyron and adhered a frosted type acrylic to the die cut.

Pocket Birthday Card

Last week I saw several cards in my reading list that was called pocket cards.  Well of course I got curious and had to take a look.  Seems there's this new stamp and die set (can't remember by who) that's come out and it's all about pockets.  Great idea, but I thought well heck there's got to be a pocket cut somewhere on one of my Cricut cartridges so I went to My Cut Search and sure enough there was one.

Since I needed a birthday card for my mom I decided to use this newly found pocket cut and incorporate it into my card.  I used:

Old West for the pocket
Create a Critter for the worm, happy birthday sentiment on the pocket and the balloons

The heart shaped balloon was adhered to an action wobble.

Wherever You Go

I finally used my Destinations cartridge for another project!  It's a cool cartridge - especially if you're one of those people who do a lot of traveling but I'm not and it came with my Gypsy so any use I get out of it is like a bonus.

When I think of buffalo I think of a breed of animal that could perservere just about anything as they roam the wide open plains.  And so when I saw the buffalo cut on Destinations I decided to use it along with Old West to create a "roaming" type theme for a card.

Once I had the layout designed I went to Quote Garden in search of a sentiment and found one by Confucius that says, "Wherever you go, go with all your heart."

Howdy Pardner

Here's another creation based on one of my March assignements.  For this one I was asked to create a card using Old West with a cowgirl theme.  Well this one could be used for a cow girl or boy.

This was a very easy card to cut and put together - especially with this great background paper I found.  It's from the All About Boys stack by DCWV.  As soon as I saw the papers in this stack I had visions of several cartridges that would work with it running around in my head.

Frog in my Pocket - Gift Card Holder

I finally got another one of my long awaited assignments completed.  This one I had to change up just a tad bit though.  The original assignment was to make a "card made with the animal kingdom cartridge. Maybe the frog...but have the card attached to or part of a thin box (cut from tags, bags, boxes, and more)for a gift card to go in"

I tried making a matchbox from TBBM but after two attempts I gave up.  I don't know if it was just me or what but it seemed like both matchbox cuts were either for the top or the inside of the box and when used together just didn't match up.  (no pun intended)

After two failed attempts I opted to go for an envelope style holder.   Other than TBBM and Animal Kingdom I also used Old West for the pocket.

For the matching gift tag I used a 2" square punch.

Handful of Thanks

I recently saw the phrase "Thanks for lending a hand" somewhere (don't remember where now) and almost immediately this card design popped into my head. Initially I created it in hopes that it would be accepted for publication but it was not meant to be. But that's okay because now I can share it with all of you.

For this one I used

A Child's Year for the Hand and the inside "border"

Tags, Bags, Boxes and More for the tag

Old West for the Thank You

Old West Manly Birthday

Okay so I know I'm a day late (and more than a dollar short I'm sure) in posting this but life has been crazy this week......

The Cricut Cardz Challenge for this week was to design a Masculine Birthday card using any cart and color scheme we wanted. Since I really loved the way last week's card turned out using the Old West cartridge I wanted to explore it some more and chose that for my cart.

Once again it was a simple card to put together. Just had to cut the cowboy and girl three times each (once for the flesh, once for the shirt and once for the pants). After that I used inks to color in the boots and hair. The rocks and other items were scaled to sizes that would fit those of the "characters" so that it would look like they were sitting around a campfire singing Happy Birthday to the card recipient.

Oh and my font is one that I downloaded from dafont.com called Alpha Smoke.

Howling Thank You Card

Today's card is brought to you buy Cricut Cardz Challenge #7. This week's assignment was to create a Thank You themed card.

I was looking through my cartridges and trying to decide what to do. All I knew was that I wanted something a little different. Then while looking through the Old West cartridge I saw the howling wolf and just knew that I had to use him.

So my moon is just a circle cut from George and inked. All my other cuts are from the Old West cartridge and my ground is actually made from sandpaper that I inked to add depth/color.