Ok, haven't made it to the scrap book store to rent a halloween cartridge for the cricut yet.  (FYI, check out your local scrapbook stores for cartridge rental.   Mine has a club you can join to rent the cartridges for $4, and keep them for a week-thanks to keith for my membership for my birthday last year :)  So anyway in the meantime i used my flying bat stamp to emboss the front of the cards and my jack-o-lantern stamp to emboss the back of the envelopes.  Looks great!  

Now, before embellishing the rest of the front of the card, i used my embossing corner punch on just the lower right corner of the card (the card opens "up" rather than from the side) I backed the doo-das I cut out of theHalloween paper with a thin cardboard.  I'm mounting them on foam squares so they "come off" the card.  If I would have left them as just the paper they would sag in between where the foam squares were placed.  So keep this in mind!!   I used dye-based black ink to "edge" around the doo-das and then attached the foam squares to the back of the doo-das, then placed them on the face of the card.   Snap! Done!  You want to use dye-based ink for edging rather than pigmented ink because the dye based ink dries instantly so you won't smear it across the doo-da.

I glued another doo-da cut-out to the lower portion of the inside of the card.   It still looked naked......hmmm   (if your scrap-book  gut feeling says you're not done, THEN YOU ARE NOT DONE!!  lol....)    Using the "Ashlyn's alphabet" cartridge, i cut the word "Boo!"  out of yellow paper that has tiny black polka dots on it.  I ran them thru my 2.5" xyron sticker maker.   My intention is to ink them with orange ink and antique them with a chestnut color.  If you have the xyron, leave the cut outs on the stickerpaper so you can make a mess inking them.  When you pull them off the sticker paper, you have nice cleanly inked cut outs. So those got stuck to the inside top of the cards.  And whammy! Halloween cards.  If this seems like a long, drawn out process, thats because it is!  I've said it before and I'll say it again: scrapping is a hobby-you are supposed to set aside personal time to do it.  That's the whole point of a hobby.   Remember people, work smarter not harder...I mass produce the elements for my projects.  I cut all the cards at once.  Then I cut out all the envelopes.  Then I make all the doo-das, etc.....then i can come back whenever I need some ME time and I'll get instant gratification  from slappin' em all together.  

Well, i have a few other kinds of cards to make.  Let me see if I can come up with some good ideas on those to share with you.  I'm not sure how to link photos to this blog thing, so in the meantime I'll post photos of these Halloween cards on FB.   xoxo!