Brighten a Day: 3D Flowers and Simple Cards

Using your Cricut and Silhouette to help brighten someone's day is easy, fun, and shows them you were willing to do something a little extra special for them. Not to mention, it is cheaper than buying real flowers--and these last. :) This project used both my Cricut and my Silhouette, though you can likely find something similar for both machines.

All you need is some cute paper, a few brads, a hook tool if you have one, some pipe cleaner, your Silhouette for the 3D flowers, and our new Cricut cartridge "Simple Cards" for this...well, simple card. :0)  (I'll be making more of these cards and showing you some of them in posts to come. They are pretty cute and really easy! Make a bunch at once and have them at your ready for when you want to just grab one and go; although, these are so simple it only takes less than a minute to make each one.) My close friend, the recipient of these items--meant to help cheer her after a rough week--loved them all and now has them decorating her room.  The flowers are cute decorations for a craft room. Try keeping them in a small jar. 

For the card:  Really, there is almost nothing to say. :)  It's so easy.  Just pick which style card you want, two colors of paper (one for the main portion, the other for the background color), and send them through your machine.  It's as simple as gluing the two pieces together.  The Cricut does the rest.  The end. :)

For the flowers:  I picked three different 3D flowers from my Silhouette library, and then ungrouped each of them so that I could rearrange their pieces to make them all fit on one sheet of paper. Can I just say, my Silhouette is awesome?  Look at how perfectly it cut those thin little petals.  For items like the more intricate chrysanthemum flower I made, your Silhouette or Cricut spatula will come in really handy.  It helped keep the petals from falling back onto the sticky mat and allowed me to sort of squeeze my way under them without tearing any of them.  Very helpful.   

Once I finished layering each of the flowers, I noticed my paper choice made them look a little bland/they didn't stand out from eachother, so I did a little chalking around the edges and then re-layered.  Note:   I did not use any glue in this project.  Once I layered the flowers I just used whatever brad I had to hold them together.  The brads spikes also helped to hold on the green pipe-cleaner that I used on stems for two of the three flowers.  I just bent some of the pipe cleaner up top and used the spikes to hold it down.  It worked perfectly!  For one flower, I found an old plastic straw that I had on-hand, and thought that might make a fun stem as well.  I stuck the brad ends right into the straw and was pleased with the fun result, which happened to stay in place wonderfully.

Hint:  One trick is to use your hook as a means of piercing through the paper where you'd like your brad to go through.  I found my hook to be much sharper and precise than the brad spikes, which tended to just bend as I attempted to push them through so many layers of paper. Using my hook took seconds, and worked like a charm.   

         In the end, I had a beautiful set of flowers, a cute card, and a means of showing love to a friend in hopes of brightening their day.  What a great thing.