"Just fluttering by to say... happy birthday to my dad..."

Ahh, I can't believe I've actually done posts for 4 days in-a-row!  It's been ages since that's happened.

First things first, I need to give a big shout out to my Dad and wish him a very Happy 65th Birthday today!!

Ha ha, what a goof!  He got a hold of Mateo's skateboard and helmet at Jaxon's last baseball game, lol.  I just love his sense of humor and I'm so glad that a little of it rubbed off on me.  :)

Okay, onto to the crafty stuff...

Well, here is my favorite card from my workshop last week.

I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with it at first, but I knew I wanted to use this cute little stamp called "A Tree".  I love the "A" sized stamps, they're only $6.95 - you can't beat that price!  And I think it was very cute paired up with the Lucy paper pack.

I ended up stamping the Tree in Cocoa ink, then I stamped the tree top again in Sweet Leaf.  I cut out the tree top and glued it down.  I also stamped those tiny little butterflies (in Cotton Candy ink) and cut them out.  (Some of my workshop peeps weren't too happy about having to cut those out.  They are quite tiny.)  

The butterfly on the tree is popped up using a tiny foam dot.  Next we added my favorite Sweet Leaf stitched grosgrain ribbon.  (I hope this doesn't go away for a long time, I use it often.)  We tied a knot in the ribbon and stuck it with a Foundry Pin Clip.  Those are so fun because they have a little slot in the top to slide in a piece of paper (or even a photo if you're scrapbooking).  We stamped the sentiment on the reverse side of the floral Lucy paper and cut it to look like a little banner.  Next was some obligatory added sparkles and voila, the card front was done!

Back in February, at that crafty retreat I went to in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (Creative University), one of the classes was a scrapbooking class.  The instructor & fellow CTMH consultant (Michelle Nist) showed us how to do a pop-up on our layout, so I took that same idea and applied it to the inside of the card.

Isn't that fun??  I just loved that added surprise when the card was opened.  We left the inside of the card blank.  No, my name and blog address wasn't printed in there, lol.  The butterfly was really easy to cut out using the Cricut Art Philosophy cartridge.  I hadn't used my Cricut in years and now ever since I've had this cartridge, I use it all of the time.

Well, that's it for my "Summertime" themed cards.  I hope you found some inspiration.  I know I haven't posted many of my past workshop cards, so I'll do some digging, get some photos taken and hopefully you'll see some of those very soon.  Happy Summer!