A Chinese Thank You Card

One and a half hour to go before we leave for the kids' last Chinese class for the year, and I realize that I forgot to make a card for the teacher. I did buy her a gift card but how dare I space out on handmade card!

Almost instinctively, I flipped open my laptop and while Cricut Design Studio is taking its own sweet time to load up, I started to look for my Pagoda cartridge. I found the box while CDS was still loading, and finished looking through the handbook just before CDS finally loaded up. I thought this card would be a breeze to make. Just a simple thank you card for the Chinese Teacher and I had assumed that the Chinese character for "Thanks" would be on Provo Craft's only Asian-themed cartridge. I was flabbergasted that I was not able to find it on the handbook. I even went through the book twice and searched through the Keyword feature on CDS. No Chinese "Thank You" on the Pagoda cartridge? Epic fail, Provo Craft!

Annoyed, I closed CDS and opened Make-The-Cut. I found the "Thank You" character online and traced it in MTC. Sized it for a quarter-fold sized card and clicked on the "Cut" button.

I needed the negative image to make the card but I was not willing to waste the positive image. I had some scrap pieces of clear Contact Paper from my canvas project so I placed it over the character-cutouts and rub it until they stick onto the contact paper.

Using my spatula, I gently coaxed the cutouts from the mat.

So now I have the positive cutouts ready to be used for another project.

For the sake of those who are not familiar with Clear Contact Paper, this is how the backing looks like. You can buy a roll at most mass merchandisers (e.g. Target, Walmart) for a couple of dollars.

Just to illustrate in this blog that the positive image cutouts can be used, I peeled off the contact paper backing and applied some glue to the cutouts while they are still stuck on the contact paper.

Once I decided where I want to place them, I lay down the contact paper and gently rubbed down the cutouts. When I am confident that the images have stuck onto my cardstock, I slowly peel away the contact paper.

This is a simple but effective method to save cutouts that cannot be welded into a single piece. I had also used the same trick to save the words left behind from cutting the "Campground" label from my last classroom project.

So, what did I do with the negative cutout from the Chinese characters? Well, I layered it onto a piece of black cardstock and adhere the whole thing to a card front that was previously embossed with Sizzix's Three Dots embossing folder. To finish the card, I adhered a 2-inch Create-A-Critter panda onto the card with mounting tape to give it some dimension.

There were 2 corners of the Chinese characters that I had missed putting some glue on, so I reapplied some glue carefully on the red layer and voila! A Chinese Thank You Card is done. :-)

To download the MTC file for the Chinese Characters for "Thank You", 

please click here.

Please note that you will need Make-The-Cut program to open the file. This file will not open in Cricut Design Studio.

Enjoy. :-)