Magnets and Mobiles for Sweet Treats Thursday

It's another "Sweet Treat Thursday" at the Cuttlebug Challenge Blogspot.  Our challenge this week was to use  hearts from at least three different Cricut cartridges to create items with a Valentine's theme.  Be sure to hop over to Cuttlebug Challenge to see all of the fantastic projects and visit each designer's blog to get more specific details on how they were created.  Today I will tell you how I made the items for the challenge.

The first thing I tried was some magnet material.  I was at Staples looking for some vellum and noticed that they had the thin printable magnet sheets so I decided to try them out.  I thought that I could cut out decorations for these little mailboxes that could be changed for the seasons and holidays.

I used my Creative Memories Storybook Creator Plus 3.0 software to choose some cute dotted papers from the With Love Digital Kit and set up the page with three papers.

I carefully planned out the placement of a variety of hearts from the Sweethearts, Wedding, George and Plantin Schoolbook cartridges to maximize the use of the magnet material.

The Staples magnet material is for inkjet printers.  I had the full page set up but somehow I made a mistake in loading the magnet or setting up the print menu so I did not have a full edge to edge print.

I needed to revise my cuts to fit in the areas that were actually printed. I added some cuts from Paper Pups to the long narrow piece.

I used multi cut 2 with the regular blade at 6, maximum speed and pressure.  I also used a new mat to be sure that the adhesive was consistently strong.  The magnet material cut very easily - it is actually quite thin.  The small cut at the bottom was due to a "loading" error on my first test cut.

Here you can see the weeded red cuts.  I found out that the tiny hearts didn't really have enough surface area to cling well - the magnetic "pull" is not that strong with this brand of material.  I think it is intended for printing up larger solid shapes as magnetic business cards or advertisements.

I wanted to be sure about the cuts fitting in the magnet material so, even though I planned the cuts in Design Studio, I did a "trial" cut on plain white cardstock before cutting the pink magnets.

When I saw that the cuts were fine I did not unload the mat - instead I pushed "load paper" and carefully placed the magnet material in the same position as the paper.  By not removing the mat I knew that any "loading errors" would not impact my cuts.

Here are the pink cuts.  I couldn't resist adding in the tiny hearts to fill the space.

The larger hearts definitely stick to the mailboxes much better than the tiny ones.  These mailboxes came from Target but I have seen similar ones at other large craft stores.






I still like the idea of changing up the mailboxes with magnetic decorations but I need to try some other brands of magnetic material to see if I can find one that has a stronger magnetic quality.  There is magnet material available from Cricut so I will look into that for next time.  I couldn't find it locally and I didn't have time to order some for this project.

For my "big" project I decided to use lots and lots of hearts to make a mobile.

I used hearts from the Sweethearts, Wedding, George and Plantin Schoolbook cartridges.  I filled in the spaces with some smaller hearts that I can use for other projects.  Some of the hearts were slightly altered in Design Studio.

The paper I chose was from the K & Company "Sweet Talk" paper stack.

 I cut the same set of hearts from nine different papers from the stack.  When you cut the same items over and over be sure to rotate your mat to even out the wear and tear.  Pay attention to the paper designs that have a definite direction and be sure the top is "up."

The header of the mobile is from the Mother's Day mini cartridge.  I cut it at five inches.

 I wanted pink for the shadow layer but I didn't want the border designs on this paper to show so I used three sheets and cut the shadow from the center (I had several of these stacks on hand - there are only two of each sheet in a pack).

I could cut two of the top layers from a single 12 x 12 sheet.  I saved the cut out words (of course!) - they will show up just a little later...

When I put the layers together I used a glue pen around the letters and on the scallops and my ATG for the straight strips.

Here are the assembled sides of the topper.  Now I needed to figure out how to put it all together!

I set out all of the hearts and started working on a "random" order of the hearts to hang - mixing styles and papers of the hearts.  It took a while (I have the worst time with "random")!

I used a large needle and some silver cord and sewed through the top and bottom of each heart.  I cut the cord lengths at about 3 1/2 feet.  The tension of the front to back threading holds the lightweight hearts together.  If they were to slip at all, I could add a sticky back gem to the cord side to hold the hearts at the proper levels.

I tied one of these little flower embellishments at the bottom of each strand (I tell you more about these cute little flowers in a day or two).

The triangle shape works well - I just needed to add some holes and some ribbon.

I used my Cropadile to punch the holes and made sure to set the guide so they would be evenly spaced.  I punched them in pairs to make the fit work.

I cut ribbons at about 18 inches and tied bows to hold the panels together.  ( I trimmed the ends later).

Once the triangle was assembled,  I added more ribbons tied at the hole at the top of each panel.

 

I used a metal binder ring to hold the three ribbons and added an additional ribbon for hanging the mobile. 

To attach the silver strands to the topper I punched holes and added these pink brads - then I wound the cord around the brad several times and trimmed the ends.

I added one more set of seven hearts by suspending it from the hanging ring so it would "float" in the center of the other strands.

Here are a few more views - this mobile is about four feet tall so it is hard to photograph.

One more view with my red front hall in the background.

Finally - a little card to go with the mobile.  I trimmed the leftover pink from the bottom layer of the topper and adhered it to a piece of deep pink cardstock.  I used the Martha Stewart loop border punch on the top and bottom of the pink section.  The card edges are inked with the same red ink I used for the sentiment.

My stamping was a little light on the capital letters of "Be Mine" so I added a bit of Stickles glitter glue to even things out.  

I added the letters from the mobile header to the inside of the card - very bold and graphic.

I really like the contrast between the pink and girly card front and the bold stencil words inside!

Congratulations if you made it this far through all of the photos and explanations.  Please let me know if you have any questions or if I left anything out.  Happy Valentine's Day!