Higher and higher

I've always had a soft spot for hot air balloons. There's something about them that puts a smile on my face every time I see them. I live about 15 minutes away from a hot air balloon ride and every Summer, two hot air balloons hang in the sky every evening. Grown ups and kids alike get excited whenever they are in sight. It is hard not to smile at the giant bubbles drifting in the sky. I plan on getting into one of those balloons some day but until I do, I'll be having fun with these balloons from the new LD Balloon Festival graphic set.

I found this set through LD's newsletter yesterday and it wasn't hard to pick out the balloon that will be the easiest to convert into a Cricut-cutable. By separating the image in Photoshop and tracing them in Make-the-Cut, these are the layers that I came up with:

I did have to make a little adjustment to the banner layer. The initial trace in MTC showed that four flags were joined together at 2 points but with a little bit of "cut-and-paste", I managed to separate  the banner into the individual flags:

The final cuts look like this:

Some foam tape and stickles later and the card is done.

The background with the sentiment was arranged in Photoshop and printed to form the card base. The sun and cloud images are from the same graphic set while LD Noodge was used for the sentiment.

Summer has gone and the hot air balloon rides have stopped for the year. Thankfully I still have these balloons and they will definitely be flying all year round.

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Just two more days to put in your entry in my cartridge giveaway! Go to Monday's post to enter.