Past Projects: Animal Card #2

Since it's Christmas eve, first let me wish everyone who's reading this a very very MERRY CHRISTMAS! I know I should be posting about christmas cards that I've made this year, but since I haven't sent out all of them, I decided not to(: Also, this year's christmas cards can easily be tweaked to use for any other holiday season! Although personally, I wouldn't do that since that same pattern adorned the last 20 or so cards that I did and I need to do something different. So, this year's christmas card design and writeup will probably be some time later(: Instead, I decided to finish off the second animal card I did, so here is my "Happy Baaaaa-thday" card for another special friend of mine!

For me, the greatest lesson in the making of this card would have to be the making of the sheep. Cotton wool really gives a very nice fluffy and squishy texture, but it is definitely one of the harder materials to handle. 

The challenge-inducing sheep

This one was slightly tougher, because I didn't base it off any picture from the internet, partly because I didn't really like the sheep images that google kept churning out for me. So, I started off with a beige coloured oval as the base. You'd want to keep the base slightly smaller than the actual size of what you want your sheep to be, because cotton wool, (for lack of a better word) tends to poof out in all directions. Initially I did the sheep with a circle base. But I realised an oval looks much more life-like.

this is the circle-base sheep. of course if you prefer this one, go ahead(:

Then comes the tricky part: deciding which adhesives to use. For the first batch of sheeps (I made three batches altogether) I tried to use white glue, because I thought that would hold it better. I ended up throwing that batch away because white glue tends to be very messy. And cotton wool by itself is a very messy material too. So two messy materials placed together creates an even bigger mess, because when glue dries, it solidifies...along with the cotton wool that's encased in it, causing it to lose it's puffiness. You'll end up with a drenched sheep. The second batch I made I used double sided tape, taping the entire circle before rolling the cotton wool into little balls. The problem with doing this is that double sided tape is only one layer, therefore, the moment a little bit of the fuzz from the cotton wool balls got onto it, the tape loses it's stickiness. 

Lesson learnt: Don't work with cotton wool.

okay, I kid. But cotton wool is definitely going to be very time consuming, very messy. If you still want to do it (because it does give a great effect), try using double sided tape. It works much better than glue, but put it on a little bit at a time. Also, before placing the cotton wool balls down, roll them tightly, even if they don't look that fluffy, it's okay. That's because you can always readjust the amount of poofiness of each cotton wool ball after you've stuck it down. 

Next, affixing the head on. whether you want the sheep to face left, right or front, one lesson I learnt is to leave a space for the head on the animal's body. In other words, if the sheep is facing front, I have a sheep head-shaped 'hole' on the body where there wasn't cotton wool stuck on it. That makes sticking the head on a lot easier for you. The head, ears and legs were basically free-hand drawn by me, but they should be quite easy to do. The head is egg shaped, the ears look like elongated tear drops, and the legs are rounded rectangles. 

three sheep in a row. And the star is there to hide my foot which somehow wormed it's way into the photo

After that, I cut out clouds from blue construction paper and grass from green construction paper. I also found some flower designed scrapbook paper and decided to cut out circles to make the colour balance look slightly more feminine. The "Have a Happy Baaaa-thday" tagline was written on vellum, which is a great way to write words without covering up your design. 

So that's all for the animal cards! Next up in the past project series will be some more birthday cards that you can easily make for your friends. I'm hoping to showcase cards for both sexes, because masculine looking cards are just so difficult to make!(:

Till next time, and to all my readers, Have a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Past Projects: Animal Card #1

So this "past projects" headline will hold all the projects I've done in the past, as I slowly attempt to document each and every one of them. Since I have the memory of a goldfish (unless we're talking about unimportant information, then my memory balloons elephant size), I will do my best to recount how I did these cards and scrap pages. As stated in my blog description, my scrapbooking journey is full of Ups and Downs. Ups like when I finally discover how to make the tool work for me, and Downs like when I mess up on the card. So it is with my recording. I will record both the Ups and Downs, and hopefully you guys (whoever reads this) can learn from my mistakes!

So this first card I did was for one of my friends in this big group that I have where everyone is in possession of an animal nickname (it's a rather long story), and so for her (and one other person) 21st birthday, I made a 12" by 12" card using her animal (monkey) as the theme. So I googled "monkey craft" to get an idea of the kind of proportions a monkey's head should have and I found this really awesome picture from fiskars website via pinterest. okay, to be absolutely honest, I didn't know about the fiskars website until I started typing this post. I based my monkeys off this image I saw on pinterest, and only JUST have I realised how much trial and error I could have avoided because the website (link above) details exactly how to make the monkey. So my lesson learnt is: always click the link back to the original. A lot of heartache and time could have been saved

Anyway, as you can see in the picture above (which is from the fiskars website) you only need to cut out two small circles, one large circle, a heartshape and an oval. Really simple right! WRONG. I guess it would have been simple if I had the die cuts for them, but since I'm on a budget, I used my miracle tools: A compass, A pencil and a pair of scissors, added with a dose of agar-ation. Basically, I've not found another monkey that looks as proportionate and cute as this one or another monkey that appeals to me. I kinda wanted it to be cartoony but not too cute.

The pictures look a bit strange, but thats cos these pictures were taken before I realised I should use a plain (either black or white) paper to work as a background before I took them. you can also see that initially I followed the picture and punched out (or rather, I poked out) the eyes, however, that gave my monkey a little creepy kind of look. and so I decided to colour it in black instead. 

  

Arranging the 3 monkeys (cos 3's a magic number for proportions!) alone on the black paper made it look really really plain. So I decided to do the background in green and yellow strips to draw reference to the monkey  (bananas and trees anybody?) my initial plan was to do a checkered pattern alternating green and yellow to fill up the entire background, but I think the final product works much better.

After adding the background, I wanted a bit more yellow on the bottom, hence the title of the card 'Have a swingin' birthday' was placed on a yellow square with green borders. You will notice that a 12" by 12" card means that I had to stick two pieces of 12" by 12" paper together, and I left approximately 1cm on the left hand side to double-sided tape the pieces together.

Yupp, this is the first animal card, a really simple and easy to make card. In fact, you could use the monkey template for many other kinds of crafts too!(: Will be back with the second past projects post on the second animal (hint: it involves loads of cotton wool!!) really soon! Hope you've enjoyed reading this, and I hope it's not too lengthy for you(: 

*do give me comments and share other ideas as well, will love to hear them!