Sooner rather than Later: Essentials By Ellen January Release

Hi everyone! I'm sharing a couple cards featuring the newest release from Ellen Hutson today. It is such a cute release, but as you'll see, I couldn't get past the penguins in the Arctic Pals set! They were just too much fun to play with!

That waving penguin just made me smile, and I pictured him kind of jumping up trying to get your attention in a crowd, and this first card just fell into place once I had that visual in my mind.

This card is both really easy and also a little time consuming. The time consuming part is because of all the masking. I actually did this twice because the first time, I only made a few masks and moved them around, but I am not a neat stamper and all I can say is, smudges everywhere.

So, the second time around I just stamped a whole passel of those penguins on some post it tape trimmed them out and just placed them over the penguins as I stamped. I did pencil in a ground line so the bottom would be level, but the rest were eyeballed.

For the second card I really wanted to work with the Strands die which is so cool that it sold out almost immediately.

I cut the die out of a panel of white cardstock and placed it over my card base to mark the edges of the opening with a pencil. Then I masked off a little beyond that area on the card base and added blue inking.

The sentiment was stamped on the die cut panel which was then adhered to the card base. I did not adhere the strands as I wanted to be able to tuck the penguins under those.

The penguins were stamped and die cut. I actually trimmed them down a bit more because I wanted the flippers to stand out, then I adhered them to the card with some foam tape placing them within the contours of the strands and adding a bit of liquid adhesive to secure the strands in place.