Tidy!

Tidy is not a word that would necessarily spring to mind when describing my work area when I'm busy crafting. I'm sure that this is true of many of you? In my defence I do clean up between projects but I'm not too bothered by clutter.

If like me, you live in Wales then this word takes on a different meaning, Tidy could be transposed for any number of words, all of which are positive like excellent, brilliant, wicked etc.

My good friend and former band mate  Andrew 'Bone' Jones, an excellent fellow and Tidy guitar player as well was blessed with a little girl last Tuesday by the name of Isabella Eira (a welsh name meaning 'snow') So many congrats to Bone and Julia.

Bone told me the happy news via text, it read as one might expect but ended with the word tidy! which is  his favourite word by far, not that he has a limited vocabulary, although now you mention it.......

I wanted to mark the occasion with a card, and the great thing about being a crafter is that you can offer something a little bit special and bespoke. I had a great idea but to make it work I had to reach for my Framelits Circles dies and my Scalloped Squares, The rest, as they say was easy. There are two sets of Framelits circles dies and even though you can create the project using just those in the link above I have lumped them all together in one folder.

I Started by selecting my papers and dies before die-cutting three different circles, two pale yellow and the smallest from Spotty pink paper. Next I placed a smaller circle against the base of the largest circle and another die roughly in the centre of the smaller yellow circle. I also trimmed away part of the spotty circle until I have the collection of shapes in the far right hand picture.

I cut the yellow 'ring' in half and fashioned one end into a chevron with my craft knife forming the end of the trunk before mounting them all together to form my elephant. Next I cut a square of ivory card and added a faux stitch effect around the perimeter with a pattern makers wheel. I matted the square onto a die-cut pink scalloped square before mounting the elephant using 3D foam pads.

Finally, I printed the word tidy onto white card and carefully trimmed around it with a craft knife forming a speech bubble.

I printed the words onto a rectangle of kraft card as well as the seal at the top (this is from a dingbats font called 'old seals' free to download from dafont.com).

TIDY!!!