My new friend

Since I love scrapbooking (and I am SO behind, by the way) and often find myself wandering down the aisles of the nearest store drooling over the fun paper crafting items, it's no surprise that I discovered the Cuttlebug. I have been considering making things such as the bridal shower invitations and bachelorette party invitations for quite some time. I took a card making class at Archivers (awesome!) and we keep receiving these adorable handmade cards in the mail from Kym...so the combination of those two things and then my discovery of the Cuttlebug sent me happily over the edge into the invitation/card making process.

What is the Cuttlebug, you may ask? It's a dye-cutting and embossing tool. The Cuttlebug is a small little guy, about as big as a photo printer. And the sides can be folded up when not in use, so it doesn't take up too much space on my desk. Here he is in all his glory...


Let me show you what this guy can do! This is an embossing folder--about the size of a small greeting card. This particular design is called "Traffic Jam." You just slide a piece of paper into the folder...


place the folder in a “sandwich” between the embossing plates that are included with the machine (I won't get into the technical details...)


and run it through using the crank on the right side...


and it will emboss a square design onto paper, like so:


Cool, huh? I mentioned that it also does dye-cutting. Same concept as above with the sandwich between the plates, but you use a metal dye-cut for the middle of the sandwich:

which produces cool little wedding-y paper shapes like so:

I've already had some fun designing a bridal shower invitation, which I think I've finalized. So now it's on to the bach party invite. Once I figure that one out and get all the supplies, some of my gal pals and I will have a girl-talkin', invite makin', martini drinkin' little get together....all thanks to my new friend! :)