Gnome Birthday Fun with BBTB2

Happy Monday!  Welcome to another Bitten by the Bug 2 weekly challenge!  This week's challenge cut was selected by my design team sister, the lovely Theresa Kelly, and  is any Gnome from the Freshly Picked cartridge.  I decided to have a bit of birthday fun with the Gnomes - creating this Gnome Pyramid birthday card.  The design for this card was inspired (and by inspired I mean ripped-off) from my friend Donna Mundinger's FABULOUS Penguin Card, which can be found here at her blog and  here at Custom Crops with design studio cut file and complete instructions.  Donna is one of THE MOST AMAZING paper crafters E-V-E-R... and I am thrilled to be able to say I know her! 

This card features six Gnomes each dressed in his favorite summer party outfit!  And just as we women match our shoes and purses (in an ideal world!), the Gnomes have matching hats, belts and shoes.  The well dressed Gnome likes for his outfit to coordinate!  The Gnome faces were stamped in light brown ink with Peachy Keen stamps.  A cherry Copic marker was used to highlight their lips. Their beards were cut in white cardstock, then heat embossed with white with touches of grey embossing powder.  Their ensembles were finished with tiny pom-poms at the top of their hats.

I used three cartridges to cut this card, Freshly Picked, George and Basic Shapes, and Christmas Cheer.  The banner above was cut from Christmas Cheer, then stamped with a rubber stamp from Michaels. 
The photo below is a screen shot of the card top in Cricut Design Studio.  I welded the six Gnome shadows together in a pyramid shape, adding birthday gifts from Christmas cheer.  I cut this layer in red, affixed it to the base card, and built the card front on top of this layer.

Below is the inside of the card.  You can see the red base cut (above) is the upside down red layer in the photo below.  I attached the red layer to the open cut triangle top.

The base card was created using George and Basic Shapes.  I sized and welded to triangles together, then inserted a NON-welded triangle into the middle of the top layer.  This created the cut out so that the blue swirl print shows through the holes in the front of the card.

I used metallic cardstocks to cut the packages and the belt buckles.  I finished the card by using pop dots to attach Happy Birthday banner!
 

Thanks for stopping by today.  Be sure to head over to Bitten by the Bug 2 and check out all of the designer's awesome projects!  And, if you have time, please consider playing along with us this week!!

Travelosity-like Gnome with Freshly Picked

Some of you may recall that last April my husband & I and "My Friend Kathy" (MFK) & her husband took a trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.  I have been slowly, VERY slowly, scrapping the photos from the trip, trying to make each page unique. Currently I am not quite halfway through the Vegas photos.

One of the aspects of the trip that I have not previously mentioned is that I booked the trip through Travelocity.  I had never used any of the on-line travel services to plan a vacation prior to this trip, though I have used the corporate travel services at work which are very similar to Travelocity.  Overall our experience was fabulous and we were quite happy with the Gnome (as we referred to Travelocity)!  The only glitch (and it was a very unhappy glitch) was the rental car ordeal, at which point we may have referred to him as the "butt-head Gnome".  The Gnome references became such a part of the trip that I decided to add Gnomes to the layouts.  I looked up the Travelocity Gnome and cut the clothing on my Gnomes to match.

Using Cricut's Freshly Picked cartridge, I cut and assembled a bunch of Gnomes (a bunch being a number greater than 12 but less than a plethora, which would have been at least two dozen).  The Gnomes were cut at 3 inches so they will be easy to use as accents on the scrap pages.  If you look at the three Gnomes in the above photograph you can see that I added black pen eyes to their faces.  I also made the eyes appear to look in different directions on different Gnomes.  The idea was to let them appear to be looking at subjects on the scrapbook pages. Some of the Gnomes will be placed in a corner of the page, while others will be peeking out from behind an element on the page, "looking" at the reader. 

I have only just begun to place the Gnomes on the pages, but I wanted to share a couple of pages with you.  This little Gnome above really wanted to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower with us but he had to make do with watching from afar.  The Gnome below was a Beatles fan and probably enjoyed the Fab Four show as much as we did.

I may take Friday off from blogging (unless I get busy tomorrow evening) but I will be back on Saturday with my monthly Everyday Cricut post.