KOLA Designs

I’m so excited to finally share all of my Ohio Circle projects with you!  Last weekend a friend and I were able to attend Provocraft’s “Road Trip from CHA” event at Kings Island in Ohio and we had a BLAST meeting so many wonderful people and creative minds!

We made quite the girl’s weekemd out of this event and the photos from our whole trip can be seen here on facebook 🙂

At events like these, Circle members bring calling cards which are kind of like handmade business cards – a chance to showcase your talent on one side and share some information about yourself on the other.  These cards are also used to enter yourself in drawings for different prizes.  I was lucky enough to have my card pulled to win a Martha Stewart Cricut Cake Machine so stay tuned as I dive into the world of food crafting – eep!

Here is the original design I had for my calling cards (you might remember my new phrase “design. create. give” from a few posts back on a tote bag I made).  I wanted to incorporate this on my cards as it really seems to express my favourite parts of the  creative process.  The file I created for the circle logo with the words however seemed to have a difficult time cutting out and I ended up adapting my design – I was really quite happy with the final result.  Many people at the event thought it was quite clever to include my picture (as I am seen on the messageboards) on my card.

Below you will see my final design, and a few of the steps in creating it.  I used Coredinations cardstock for the background which is AMAZING!! I embossed each one with the circle logo Cuttlebug folder and then sanded them to add more dimension and bring the green colour through.

I used my iRock (for the first time!) to add four rhinestones to each calling card, to separate the words:

In addition to trading calling cards, most of the events also have a swap – sometimes it could be ribbon, twine, cards, etc.  Something you make or bring to trade with other people’s made or brought item.  Since this event’s theme was Road Trip, the swap was magnets!  This was so much fun and I came home with a lot of really cool magnets!!  I decided to do a suitcase with my magnet and wanted to have something on there to represent that we were coming from Canada so I added a little maple leaf in addition to the map of the USA and the circle logo.  All of the layers were cut with vinyl and the bases were cut out of Cricut Cuttable Magnet Material so the whole piece will lay flat on the fridge (or wherever people decide to store their magnets!).

We were also issued a challenge (which acted as another competition to win sweet prizes) to create a pennant (one piece of a banner) that showcased where we were from.  Here is my pennant representing Southwestern Ontario 🙂  I had a lot of fun creating this – especially the Trillium flower since I had to create it using various cuts from Accent Essentials since there isn’t a cut on any cartridge for this, our Province’s flower.

And last but not least, I made Kristie and I some sweaters for the trip!  Seeing as we watched the temperature read 103 degrees as we were driving and we’re having the hottest Summer on record, perhaps sweaters weren’t the best choice, lol, but we love them and got a lot of compliments from our new crafty friends!  It was seriously so great to meet so many people who had an appreciation for what we do and can really understand the work that goes into each project we create 🙂
For our sweaters, I cut out the design I used for the suitcase magnet in heat transfer vinyl and ironed them on the back of our sweaters.  Then for a couple extra touches I added a little cricut head poking out of one of the pockets, and our names over the circle logo on the front of the shirt.   I didn’t actually get a good picture of the back of the shirts, but here are the extra touches (pictures taken from my blackberry):

That’s all for now!!!