Hello Tiger!

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to teach workshops in the beautiful Slovenian city of Maribor. It is the second year that I have attended the Art Trade Creative Week event  and it was so good to meet old friends and make some new ones along the way. I would like to offer up a big thank you to Primoz and Mihaela for once again being the most generous and helpful hosts imaginable, I would also like to thank their incredible team who work tirelessly to bring it all together and I can't finish without a big thank you to everyone who attended the workshops and supported this wonderful event, I could type up a list of names at this point but the truth is I would hate to forget someone..... You know who you all are!!!

If you want to see a few of the photographs and find out more about this truly international event then click on this link, and if you fancy a city break next March combined with some top quality art and craft workshops then my destination of choice would be Maribor!

I was teaching mixed media style projects at the event but at the end of each workshop I showed the class how to create a bunny from a set of Framelits Hearts after which I promised to blog the idea this week but..... I'm going to break that promise and post a new cuddly creature (the clue is in the title!!!) instead, however, if you want to see the bunny idea and many more like it, all you have to do is go to the top of the page and click on my picture before scrolling back to posts dated March 5th/February 26th 2014. 

As I mentioned I'm going to use my Framelits Hearts and the New Thinlits Alphanumeric alphabet from Tim Holtz as well as a lovely little Thinlits set called Happiness Phrases.

I'm using the 3 smallest hearts from the set and I have cut one large and three small orange hearts, one medium white heart and two small pink hearts. Good stiff card stock is  the best thing to use.

Next, I used the large heart die to cut the medium white heart in two pieces before attaching to the large orange heart. next I used a pair of scissors to snip a few pieces of black card into triangular lengths.

I attached six of the black pieces to the face as shown before adding one of the small pink hearts for the tigers nose using an adhesive foam pad. I then took two of the small orange hearts and made a couple of snips in each one as shown before attaching to the rear of the tigers head along with a couple of black pearl gems. For the finishing touch I attached the the last pink heart to its orange counterpart as shown before attaching to the rear of the tigers face with an adhesive foam pad to create a smiley mouth (he merely looks confused otherwise!)

 I took my 'Hello' die and the Thinlits letters to create the word 'TIGER' and placed them on grey and olive green card before die-cutting through my Big Shot.

Here's the finished card, as you can see I used the negative letters for the word 'TIGER' which was trimmed to size and attached using a brad and eyelet.

I hope you like it because I have a few more heart die ideas to share at some point in the future.