Paper Cupcake Artiste Blog Hop

If you've come from Tasha Valdez's blog, you're on the right trail!  I hope you've been enjoying all of the samples from Close to my Heart's Artiste Cricut cartridge.

The "f" key (found on page 54) is really awesome! I might be biased, so you should discover for yourself how good it is -- oh, wait, the whole cartridge is awesome!!

Back to inspiring you! I started thinking about how to do something different with the "f" key.  Flowers in a pot are always a nice thing.  A bouquet would make for a lovely teacher, co-worker, and/or boss gift and liven up an area.

But then I thought about the upcoming graduation season.  How about a unique way to give money to someone?!

If you look closely you'll notice the stems of the flowers are money.  In this case $20 bills, but you can use whatever denomination you'd like.  And as many flowers as you want to make.

I took our Scholastic paper (this is for graduation after all) and cut the pot.  The best thing about our background and texture paper is that it is two sided so I only had to cut out one pot and got the lip with a contrasting pattern and color -- PERFECT!  Next, I cut the leaves and vine out of New England Ivy and the flowers from Cranberry cardstock.  The flowers are made from two cuts.  The back part is the flat flower cut at 3 different sizes.  The center is a 3-D flower.  I glued them together and whaalaa, a beautiful flower.

The final cut was the saying for the "garden" and that came from our equally awesome Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge.  The saying came from the included stamp sets.  It says "congratulations".

Since I've taken so much of your time, you should come back tomorrow to see more of the step by step method I used to put these together.  And I have another sample for a wedding!

Hop on along to the beginning of our trail at Bren Yule's blog!  See you soon!  :)