Birthday Tag Paper Dolls

It's another busy birthday month in our family.  The triplets turned eight while we were in San Francisco for the wedding so their birthday celebration was postponed until this weekend.  I had a "last minute" idea for tags for their presents and ended up improvising to create just what I needed.

We often give the boys similar but slightly different presents.  This year we chose three of the Eyewitness series of books and the books were about Pirates, Knights and Vikings.  I remembered that there is a knight and there are a couple of pirates on the Paper Doll Dress Up cartridge but I couldn't find a Viking...

I didn't have time to adapt an image using Design Studio so I did the next best thing - a bit of hand cutting and pasting!  I noticed that beard on the leprechaun page had points that could pass for horns and the hat for the pioneer boy had a rounded helmet look.  With a few snips, I trimmed the jagged edges of the beard and removed the lowest brim of the hat.  I cut the point off the beard and attached it to the back of the hat and then I had a helmet with horns!

 I used some of the simpler clothing from other characters and ended up with a fairly convincing Viking.

The dolls were cut at five inches on blackout to eliminate the facial cut lines so I could stamp their faces with the largest stamp in the Everyday Character Assortment from Peachy Keen Stamps.

I put together the three characters with very little time to spare so they are very basic - but cute!

Each character was adhered to a craft card stock tag card and attached the the wrapped book.  I added an extra layer inside the card - I inked the layer to make it ready to add a personal message.

It's always a bit tricky to do "separate but equal" gifts for kids but they seemed to like the books  (and the "green paper" bookmarks inside the cards that they will spend as they like!).

 

When we do birthday celebrations for the triplets, they blow out the candles on their individual cakes in age order (oldest first).

This year the cakes were each a different flavor and decorated as a soccer ball...

 a swimming scene from the movie Jaws II (complete with severed limb!)...

 and a Bruins hockey logo!

The cakes were made by their older sister and she did a excellent job with the designs (they tasted great too)!

It really is amazing to see how grown up the boys are - getting taller and more unique in their personalities everyday.

The take away tip for today
You can almost always find a way to make what you need with the Cricut.  You may have to resort to a bit of hand cutting.  When you look at the existing items on a cartridge just think about the shape and not the name or label.  You may be surprised at all of the alternative uses you can have.

I hope you are having a nice weekend.  The weather is crisp and cool here with bright skies - if only it would stay that way!

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