It’s my friend and downline Jan’s birthday today. Happy Birthday Jan!

She’s such a talented crafter herself that it’s a real challenge to try to make something special that she won’t have seen before. I’m not sure whether this quite fits the bill but I hope so.

I have been making a few of these diorama (also called shadowbox) cards recently. Last week’s classes included a bauble diorama card (I’ll have this available as an online class this coming weekend) and at the last team training we made a hot air balloon diorama card as our make and take (details in this post here if you’d like to come along to our team training on the 25 August).

This is a large (A5) diorama, using Textured Tangerine Tango card for the base and Textured Basic Black card for the inner frame. The Labels Collection framelits (125598) were used to die cut the apertures. The edges of the front and back pieces were sponged with Tangerine Tango, Cajun Craze and Soft Suede inks. A background of Very Vanilla was brayered with Pumpkin Pie and Tangerine Tango inks. Lovely as a Tree (W101223) was stamped, masked and stamped again with Black Stazon and the Eiffel Tower from the Artisitic Etchings set (W118517 or C120573) and the sentiment from the Curly Cute set (W117014 or C120510) were also stamped in Black Stazon. Oak leaves from the same Lovely as a Tree set were stamped onto Whisper White card, coloured with markers and cut out before popping up on dimensionals, overlapping the aperture. The whole front of the card was spritzed with a mixture of Champagne Mist Shimmer Paint (116806) and rubbing alcohol to give the gold lustre.

Another framelit was cut from Very Vanilla card to use as a message panel on the back. This was sponged with Tangerine Tango ink and stamped again with the Eiffel Tower.

The Eiffel Tower repeated on the card also matched one on the bag that I gave her as a present and is intended to remind her of the excellent time we had at Convention in Paris last year 

I’m pleased to report that she liked them both.

Sara xx