CCM Challenge – Around the World

This is my current project for the Crafty Cardmakers Challenge blog.

Our mission this week was to take our crafting ‘around the world’. My head buzzed with all sorts of ideas for this one. I even considered making a spinner card with a world as the centre and dangling things around it, but my asperations were bigger than my practical application!

Anyhow I settled for Africa as my destination. I have a nice set of wild animal stamps that I bought a long, long time ago from Frantic Stamper in the US and knew these would be perfect for what I had in mind.

This week I got my first Big N Juicy Inkpads, yes I know a day and a dollar late. Anyhow I coloured my background with the Spice pad, choosing colours mainly from the orange section, which I dabbed randomly over the card. I then blended them in (by the way Sheena Douglass never seems to whinge that blending makes her arm ache but it did mine – I must be a right weakling). Before the ink dried I spritzed over the top with Touch Of Mica mist in Gold, which had the effect of lifting the ink in a few places.

I inked up my tree stamp in Vintage Photo, Shabby Shutters and Forest Moss DIs and stamped it three times, the last one clearly much paler and was meant to look further in the distance but I boobed and put a slightly darker one furthest back. DUH idiot, lol. The cheetahs or are they leopards? I Inked with Memento black.

I used the green area of the Spice pad to highlight under the tree and under the cats, and went around the outside with a shade from the darker end of the pad to blend it all in.

The background papers are all handmade papers from my stash and apart from the layer immediately beneath my image I gutted the others as the card was just too gorgeous to leave hidden behind it, and will give me something to play with later.

Sadly the camera has not picked up the shimmer of these papers. That copper mat is just so sparkly.

The letters I cut using a Sizzix Alpha and the same black paper that is beneath the image. I love the way it has cut the letters out of areas of gold patterning and left them looking like they have tribal markings on them. In fact that black paper has chinese patterns all over it! So my card has gone further around the world than I intended.

Do be sure and check out the Crafty Cardmakers blog and join in the fun. This week we are sponsored by who are offering a £10 voucher for the winner. Kind of wish I was not a teamie today, cos then I could enter! LOL, mind you I would still need to win it!