Pirate bear

Another week, another challenge at Lili’s Little Fairies. Last week, after my first challenge entry, I had decided that I wanted to try to enter in the next one also, no matter the theme. Then on Thursday I went over and saw what this challenge was on. A masculine card! Oh boy… I was gutted. Having struggled through making 4 boy cards already this month, not only was I completely out of ideas, but there were nobody to make the card for! After lots of thinking, I finally remembered my boyfriend’s wee cousin will turn 9 in March. (Never mind my boyfriend’s birthday next month, that will have to wait as I can’t post that on here just yet, haha.) And thus the card making begun.

The cards added for inspiration in the challenge post worked as intended, and I decided to start straight on the card. I dived into a huge pile of paper and found… nothing! There were pinks and flowers and the left over papers for the masculine cards I’d recently made, which I refused to reuse already.

After a lot more thinking, I remembered my Tim Holtz pad of papers and with quite a relief there were some excellent papers there. I had completely forgotten about it as I hadn’t used it before. The teal and blue paper needed a contrasting colour and I ended up on choosing brown as it would match the obvious stamp choice as well as I had recently gotten a lot of brown ribbon.

With the colours chosen, I went on to colour one of my favourite stamps. The pirate teddy bear from Lili of the Valley, which I coloured in with copics. The white around the coloured stamped image didn’t feel right, so got the scissors out and started cutting, slightly worried I was making a mistake cutting it out and that it would ruin my coloured bear. Not only did I cut it better than I had anticipated, but I loved the look of the cut out image! It worked a ton better than the squared white image.

To complete the look I added a greeting tag, a die cut number and a double bow. I had come across Bev‘s excellent bow tutorial earlier in the week and it was the perfect opportunity to try it. I merely added two on top of each other to get the double effect.

As posted yesterday, I made two bookmarks to match the card as a small extra gift as this kid loves to read. The monster one is for fun, while the one without eyes will fit better inside a book. This is what they look like:

I look forward to updating some of my recent posts with better photos next week! The colours of the card and the bookmarks are somewhere between the two photos… It is actually the same paper I have used on both, without alterations to the colours!

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Update: What a lovely surprise I found waiting for me; I was picked for the top 3 at Lili’s Little Fairies for this card!