The Bugbytes: Jazzed up gift bag

Hello Bugbytes followers! Hope everyone had a wonderful New Year's celebration. This is Melody from A Splash Here and There blog. Thanks Pam for having me over here once a month! One of my son's classmates celebrated her 10th birthday during the holidays so I wanted to give her a little something when my kids go back to school on Monday. I bought this pack of small gift bags from Michaels recently - there are a total of 13 small bags ready to decorate.

This is a print and cut project designed on the Silhouette Studio and cut with my Cameo. I started out by sizing a rectangle at 8.25 x 5 as the base mat for the front panel. Using the internal offset feature, I created an inside layer. I again used internal offset to create another layer, but this time used the print only feature in dashes to create a faux stitching effect. I chose pink for the faux stitching to match the mat I’m going to attach this panel to after cutting. The cherry blossom is an image by Jamie Koay, purchased from the Silhouette Store. Instead of cutting the image, I turned it into a sketch using the sketch feature on the Silhouette Studio. Again, to match the pink base, I set the sketch to print in pink. You can choose to have your Cameo sketch the image for you if you have sketch markers, but this “sketch” printed just fine on my printer.

This is how the page printed out from my printer. For the sentiment, I used the Choppin Script, one of the fonts already in my computer. The marks on the top corners and the left bottom corner will tell the Cameo where to cut.

(close up of the sketch and faux stitching)

And this is how it looks like after cutting.

(yep, you can use a Cricut mat on the Silhouette Cameo)

I cut a pink mat to size to go behind the front panel then adhered them together. The next step is to adhere them onto the front of the gift bag. I added some gems to the blossoms for some interest, then added a pink bow and a premade pink flower to the handles to finish it off.