A Christmas Surprise REVEALED!

So, I’ve done this thing for my kiddos where I’ve hand made stockings for them.

One of my 18yo daughters came to us a little later in her life, and I wanted to make sure she had a handmade stocking, too.

Unfortunately, life isn’t as simple as it once seemed. My body can no longer do the same things it used to, so it took me longer to get this done. I also had to think outside the box.

I can no longer do the needlework, but I can make my Silhouette Cameo sing and boy did it. Here’s the “symphony” we created together.

There’s a pattern for the stocking. I had my Cameo cut it out for me.

I pulled different files from the Silhouette Design store and created the scene which I cut out of HTV. It’s kind of hard to see it in this picture, but the HTV is glittery 🙂

This was my first HTV project, so I was a little nervous about applying the vinyl to the stocking front. But I watched a lot of videos and did my research. I even cut out test pieces and applied them before I tried this. Luckily, it worked 🙂

The next step was sewing the stocking pieces together so it actually held things. I was nervous, but I managed to get through it and the sewn part turned out better than I thought it would. But I didn’t have very high expectations of myself, so that made it easier 😉

Let me just stop here and say, I am not a seamstress. My husband has actually used the words, “I rue the day I bought you that thing.” (Meaning the sewing machine).

After creating the stocking I hand stitched the bling around the top and closed up that top seam (I left it until last to make sure I had enough space for her name. Math and numbers aren’t my strong suit). Last, I added a few sparkly things to the snowflakes and parts of the scene.

She saw it for the first time this morning. The look on her face was worth all the recuts and all the extra rolls of HTV I had to buy because I kept messing up.

She was truly surprised and really liked it.

To me, that’s the best part of Christmas. Giving of yourself and seeing someone’s joy later. And that giving can come in many forms, not just a glittery stocking. AND, even better, it’s something we can do all year.

So Merry Christmas my friends. May you feel the love of those around you and give it freely to those whose paths you cross.

Xoxo

Links to project pieces:

Stocking pattern (there are directions, but I did my own thing.)

Church, Snowflake scroll, Saying

A Christmas Surprise

I have one.

But I can’t share it yet 🙂

But I’m pretty excited with how this project came out. I can’t wait to share it 🙂

Not Your Ordinary Christmas Cards

My husband needed something a little extra special. I looked at what I was working on – files from the Silhouette Design store to make Christmas ornaments.

I made the ornaments.

And cards.

I made the ornaments, as designed and directed, but I did employ some print and cut. I also added a few extra layers to the back of the ornaments for a little more stability.

Then I designed the cards to have the opening cut out to fit the ornament. I also printed off a flat, one layer design that looked like the paper layered design in the ornament. I printed it then cut it out. I didn’t want a blank circle once the recipients removed their ornament. You can kind of see the different stages in this picture.

I affixed the ornament to the card front using some dotto/hermafix temporary adhesive by EK Success. I like this because it holds things in place, but has an easy release and rubs off cleanly.

Here are the finished cards.

 

Thanks for stopping by! xoxo

Links to the projects: Comfort and Joy, Holly and Ivy, Seasons Greetings, Winter Wonderland

Adhesive

 

Christmas Cards Part the Sixth

Mary at SVG Cuts does such amazing work designing and making so many wonderful and fun things. I LOVE this gingerbread house. I modified it a little because of the paper I was working with. I wanted the brown paper, but it wasn’t as sturdy as I wanted it to be for a box card, so I modified a few things 🙂 I added stickles and used a pearl like pen to finish it off.

I tried not to reuse any of the cards from last year for my husband to take to work, that way there weren’t any duplicates, but I couldn’t resist this one. It’s one of my favorites. It takes a little more time because of all the shading and glitter I added, but it was so worth it in the end 🙂

This last one is actually a birthday card for a friend who has a birthday this month, but it can be used as a winter/Christmas card just as easily. This image is actually a sketch file from the Silhouette Design Store, but I printed it instead so I could use my copics to color it in. The ovals and scalloped frames are also from the store, as is the little tag  beneath

Thanks for stopping by!

xoxo

Links to projects: Gingerbread house, Poinsettia card, Pine Cone, Frames

Christmas Cards the Fifth

Almost done. Really 🙂

I transitioned to box cards 🙂

The first one I didn’t do too much extra with, but I did shade the red paper on Santa.

The next is from a new kit SVG Cuts released this month. I’m so excited to play with it 🙂 I added in an extra piece (the blue background isn’t part of the file) and did quite a bit of shading on flowers and foliage. This card is super easy, especially if you refrain from the craziness I seem to love 🙂

Links to box cards: Santa, Amaryllis

MRI Results Are In

I called for the results. I was too nervous to wait much longer. And today was the day the radiology nurse suggested I call if I hadn’t heard anything. So really, I did a pretty good job waiting 🙂

So, the results: The MRI is stable. No change. We still have the same abnormalities we did last year. She did say that the regression we saw could be indicative of autism and suggested we have him evaluated at one of the other clinics there.

A couple of things to note:

First – never ONCE did I think our results would be worse than before. It never crossed my mind. If you read the first blog post about this scan, I was actually a little concerned the opposite would be true. I’m SO grateful that this possibility was not the outcome. I never would have seen it coming.

Second – little man has been on autism watch for the last 6 months or so. So this wasn’t a surprise. We don’t have a name for what’s going on with him, but we have symptoms, and we’ve been treating those almost since the beginning.

Third – our pediatrician and I have already been talking about taking little man and his 6yo brother to the genetics clinic to see if they can find some answers for both boys. I would LOVE to see a brain scan of the 6yo to see if it looks anything like his little brother’s, but they don’t let parents request those 😉

So, no miracle brain mending yet, but that’s okay. I’m more at peace with this outcome than either of the other two. I think part of that is just the comfort of knowing that what we’re dealing with hasn’t really changed. And although we don’t know what we’re dealing with exactly, we know the symptoms and we have the services in place to deal with those.

Thanks for coming along on this crazy ride with us.

xoxo

I Could Be a Magician. Pixscan Mat Fixed!

I have a love/I’m so sad you don’t work relationship with my pixscan mat. And in this relationship, I take comfort in knowing it’s not me. It’s totally the machine. My machine does this annoying little thing where it pulls my pixscan mat in too far while reading the second registration mark. Then it spits the mat out the back. Obviously, this doesn’t work. And the whims of the machine seem tied to updates. It can work well, then after an update, I have this same issue. So I wait.
I know my software is up to date, but yesterday, I remembered my machine had FIRMWARE. I checked to see which version I was on. It was 1.40 I went to the Silhouette America site to see if there might be another version. There was. It was 1.6 – I may have missed firmware update or two.
I updated my machine following the instructions on my screen. It took about 15 minutes and I got to see the screen on my machine change to various pretty colors.
I just tried my pixscan mat and it worked on the first try! I’m so excited 😀 I haven’t tried again, so I hope it wasn’t a one time thing, but considering it didn’t work at all before, I think my chances are pretty good 😀
So, if you’re having similar issues with your pixscan mat, this may be a good starting point for you, too 🙂
Thanks for stopping by!
xoxo

The Barcode Scan Feature Failed Me

And Silhouette American customer service can’t help me.

Let me show you some things.

Here’s how the finished card is supposed to look.

Well, something like that. This is my second one and the coloring is a little different. But you guys are smart. You can keep up 🙂

So my card making process on the Cameo for something like this isn’t hard. I added the striped background. I centered a white square on top then added my focal points.

I then printed it off using the barcode option, because I wasn’t going to cut it right away. I was waiting for marker refills, so I designed 3 different cards, printed them all off in this fashion and saved them for later.

When my marker refills came in, I got to work 🙂

Then I put the paper into my machine and hit the barcode icon. And my machine started cutting out a totally different file, ruining 2 days of work.

It’s done this to me once before. I think it was the same wrong file, too. A file that no longer even resides in my library.

I think there was a glitch and the barcode was somehow misinterpreted, either in printing or scanning.

Silhouette customer service says I messed up the registration marks and my image was in the way.

They’re wrong. I printed and cut out the file again, and this time it cut perfectly. And neither of those two issues would make the machine cut out a completely different file.

Let me show you what happened.

That thick black line around the outside of the image is the cut line – the computer tells the machine this is where the paper needs to be cut. The barcode looking thing in the upper right corner is, you guessed it, the barcode 😉 The hash marks and the dark black line in the corner, that’s a registration mark (one of them). As you can see, the image is within all the visible borders.

In this picture, you can see a rectangle was cut, but it’s WAY off. And it cut through my image, making it unusable as is. At this point, if that’s all that had happened, it was possible for me to try and come up with something to play it off, like I meant to do this for some cleaver, creative reason. And it’s even *possible* (a little snowflake in Arizona type possible) that bad registration marks or placement could have caused this particular cut.

But not these cuts. These cuts aren’t even part of this project. 

Nor are they part of any of the two other projects designed in this same workspace. I wish I’d let it finish cutting, so I could see which project it was. But I believe it’s from a different card. One that’s already made and for which the file has already been deleted.

But it seems as though Customer Service ignored these miscuts and sadly, they weren’t helpful.

I feel like this feature is still in beta and no one’s said anything. Or it’s something that didn’t work like they wanted, so they just stopped working on it. I don’t know. But the company really isn’t supporting this feature. It doesn’t yet work how they’ve advertised (they say you can cut without even opening up the file/software. I haven’t seen how, yet). There don’t seem to be any tutorials (at least not easy to find, and not last time I checked) for this feature. And customer service all but ignored the barcode part of my issue, instead blaming my registration marks and placement of the image. Even when I mentioned the barcode, it wasn’t addressed or acknowledged.

Sometimes the barcode scanning works really well. Although, on the three images this project was part of, only one cut successfully. The other had a failed barcode scan, and this one, while the scan appeared to be successful, it cut out the wrong images. But other times, it works. I think the key feature in both times it miscut, was the length of time between printing and cutting. Which is unfortunate, because being able to print now and cut later is kind of what this feature seems to be all about.

 

Links to project: elf digi stamp, striped background

 

 

 

Christmas Cards Part the Fourth

Still working on fun 🙂

This card involved digital elements as well as an actual stamp 🙂 The background and the fairy are digital. I printed them off, colored, and then cut them out. Then I stamped the greeting 🙂

This is a stamp I bought a few months ago because, look at it 😉 This card is almost completely old school with no digital 🙂 I stamped and colored the image. Cut out all the papers. Used embossing powders and gel pens. When it was time to cut out the stamped portion, I tried to use my pixscan mat, but my machine and that function still don’t get a long. Which is a shame, because it’s such an awesome feature. Instead, I created and cut out two frames. One is the mat. The other I traced around my stamped image then cut the image out by hand. I got the right size by using the pixscan function, even if my machine wasn’t able to cut it out.

And we have a Christmas box card! I think I’ve shifted into the box card making part of my seasonal cards 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!

xoxo

Links to the projects: fairy digi stamp, pattern/digi paper, postcard stamp, snow globe box card

Can We Put that Miracle on Hold?

Im sitting in the MRI waiting room.

My son is sedated and having his brain scanned. We’re looking for more answers or clarification of information we already have.

I’m trying not to stress about the results of my foster son’s second MRI.

But not for the reasons you might think.

Our foster son’s adoption case hinges heavily on the previous MRI which showed some abnormalities.

What if the scan comes back normal? This could potentially give the parent’s attorney a little more ammunition to dissuade the judge from granting the termination of parental rights when he hears the case at the end of January.

A normal MRI also leaves us with more questions. It actually takes away possible answers. I mean, we kind of have an explanation for his multiple delays. We’re just not sure how/if it applies yet. We’re still in the information gathering period.

But something is going on with my son. The neurologist listed his diagnosis as global delays. Not only do we have delays – some profound – we’ve seen regression in some areas as well this year.

I’m advocating my butt off for him trying to get him seen so we can unravel what’s going on. Then I can make sure we’re meeting all of his needs correctly. The abnormal MRI from last year can be a significant puzzle piece.

So I’m conflicted.

I would love to see a miracle. But I dread it a little at the same time. And it stinks that I’m sitting here in an empty waiting room worried about seeing a miracle. Who does that?

But I believe in a God of miracles. So I’m also working on moving the fear out and making room for the faith. Faith that whatever happens, it’s in His hands.

No matter the results, we’ll navigate them and I’ll continue to advocate for my son.