Guest Designer: Ellen ♥ CardMonkey!

Hi Everyone! 
My name is Ellen, but most of my papercrafting pals know me as the CardMonkey.  I'm guest designing for Jennifer this week, and I've been busy in the PaperJungle making cards to feature here and, well ... to give as gifts for Valentine's Day.  I've still got a lot of crafting to do to be ready for the L♥VE day, but ... well, it's M♥nkeyL♥ve Day 366 days this year, so what's the rush?!

Shhh...don't tell hubby yet, but this is his Valentine's Day card!  To make it, I used this adorable sock monkey cut that I received from Bonnie Beck.  Bonnie and I are part of a cut swap group that's formed among Facebook friends. She writes that she made this sweetie using the Cricut Lite cartridge called "Sugar and Spice."

These Facebook groups are a great way to get cuts from Cricut cartridges you may not have, and also to have neat ones that you may not have thought of creating yourself. 

Another helpful Tip of the Day: If you aren't sure how to find what's on your cartridge, go to My Cut Search (www.mycutsearch.com), where you can enter a phrase as silly as "sock monkey" and find this cut.  Enter just "monkey" to find even more places to find more cuts of the species! :)

Naturally, this is a great cut for me to use for hubby, since our little pet name for each other is "Monkey" or some endearing off-shoot of it -- like when I call him "Monkey Butt."  He does get even, not to worry ... like this time on the occasion (several years ago!) of my 50th birthday.

Anywhooooo, back to the card.  I created the adorable Valentine's Day tickets using a Tim Holtz' Sizzix die (shown at left) that creates 5 tickets in a strip, along with the companion ticket stamps collection called "Odds and Ends." Aren't the tickets sweeet? I got these from www.scrapbook.com.

For the quote balloon, I set the sentiment using my computer/printer, fussy cut it into the shape I wanted, and inked the edges in pink. I then put it on an Action Wobble. The background papers are from my stash.

So now that I've gotten your interest, please be sure to come over to my blog to follow along. I've started the countdown to an ENORMOUS month-long Blog Candy Lalapalooza in March 2012, where I'll be giving away more than $300 worth of my favorite things.  It kicks off with the "Our Favorite Things Blog Candy Extravaganza Blog  Hop" March 3-4 starting at my friend Dena's blog. Only CardMonkey FOLLOWERS will qualify to win one of each of MY four weekly humongous prize packs, so come, play along.  I'm at http://cardmonkey-business.blogspot.com.