Animal Magic!

If you are both British and of a certain age you will no doubt remember the show from the title, featuring jovial zoo keeper Jonny Morris. Cute animals are everywhere at the moment in surface design, cards, gift wrapping, fabrics and yes, you guessed it, in Sizzix dies too (this is where the magic comes in!)

When I saw these designs I was so excited because of their simplistic beauty. they lend themselves perfectly to children's projects and rather than create one card I thought I'd make 4. They are designed by Eileen Hull, a very smart lady who always comes up with the goods! Thanks Eileen for making my job a whole lot easier.

There is nothing clever to see here today, no fancy techniques or patterned papers just great dies doing what great dies should! The dies featured are in two sets, Thinlits Die Set 7PK Elephant & Giraffe 658976 and Thinlits Die Set 8PK Lion & Monkey 658973.

To create the base card (each measuring 8 x 12cm) I started by printing the greetings using my computer using my Publisher software. If you have ever used Word then this is really easy to use. All the fonts are free to download (Try the website dafont.com, its really easy to find what you need).

 printing your own greeting is a great way of making a handmade card even more personal and you can adjust the sizes to accommodate your design elements too. For those font obsessives amongst you, here are the fonts that I used:

• Blackjack
• Stereo 
• Hoedown
• Showguide
• Saddlebag
• Bebas Neue
• BigNoodle Titling

Here are the cards that I printed off onto heavy weight white card trimmed to size and ready to go.

I deliberately used simple bold colour combinations for each of the animals in question and cut them out before sticking the pieces together using PVA glue.

Next I added some tiny 2mm pearls for eyes and attached to the card using 3D foam pads.

Same again for the giraffe.......

The Lion..........

And of course, the elephant who also features a length of string tied around his trunk.

I think I can afford to say without sounding too boastful that these are pretty cool cards because all the magic comes from the great dies. Sometimes all you have to do is just cut and stick!