A sad moment for this Great Aunt

Shaun, one of the premature twins of my nephew passed away yesterday.   He died peacefuly in his mother's arms. He needed emergency surgery, and seemed to improve for a while, but deteriorated rapidly over the last 48 hours.

It breaks my heart to see my nephew and his wife go through this. 

I don't know about you, but when I am upset, I clean.  So I have cleaned the kitchen, the pantry and was about to start on the oven when I got the urge to cook.  So I proceeded to make up a batch of butter chicken and divided it up into single serves just for me ;-)  Of course, the kitchen was messy again so I cleaned again!

I came into the craft room to make a few sympathy cards - this was very hard to do.

After several attempts, I came up with this one - for Robert & Jade

I am still working on one for my sister.

I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to make cards, so I turned to my computer for something to do. 

I had been asked by a friend to make a card for her husband with a farm theme and decided to use an image from http://www.craftsuprint.com/. 

I printed on some gloss cardstock, but the ink would not dry and kept bleeding.  I then printed it out on some photo paper and that turned out lovely, but was not thick enough to make a card.  It took about 30 mins to hand cut the barn and all the animals out of the photo paper, then about another 15 mins layering. 

The front looks OK

then stuck it on some cardstock using JAC paper and hand cut the thick cardstock

YUK!   my cardstock edges were terrible and while I was putting it all together,

some of the ink rubbed off the photo paper! - one ruined card ;-(

Then I had a bright idea ;-)  how about using my CraftROBO - it can print and cut!  This 'print and cut' feature was the deciding factor in my CraftROBO vs Cricut debate.

Those of you who have used the auto trace software with the CraftROBO know that it is not as easy as it sounds.  Long story short, several thousand clicks & drags and 8 hours later, I have produced a card that I am reasonably happy with ;-)

I ended up having to make two GSD files for the print and cut to work - one for the animals and one for the barn.  If you look closely, there is still some work to do and I will fine tune my GSD file in the future so that I can use it again.

This exercise was a real challenge and I was glad of the diversion for a few hours ;-)

It really helps when you have some nice graphics to start with and this file from http://www.craftsuprint.com/ was a real pleasure to work with. 

I just hope I have not infringed any copyright laws by making a GSD file so that I could save a whole lot of hurt using scissor to cut out all the layers ;-)
I will be sending this picture to the CraftsUprint website so that they can see what I have made with one of their files.

RIP Shaun Robert Gibbens - you were on this world for such a very short time, you will not be forgotten.