Welcome to my crafty blog and a first outing for the hot air balloon die from Claritystamp’s Craft Club last month. I thought it would work well with the layout from Atlantic Hearts and I added in the central column of outdoors, blue & water from TicTacToe‘s grid. I’m also going to share it with Seize the Birthday for their ‘anything goes’ theme.

I started with a couple of pieces of Claritystamp’s designer card and cut them into triangles for the land & the sky. Those who know me well won’t be surpirised to hear that this took longer than making the rest of the card! I eventually settled on a piece from ‘Antarctica’ for the sky and ‘Toscana’ for the land – this piece looks like there’s a lake across the bottom, with trees going up the side, don’t you think?

I die cut the balloon in white card, trimmed out out of it’s frame and attached it to the card front.

Having done that, I thought the balloon part needed paper piecing to fill it in, so used the other part of the Toscana card to recut it. I remembered to add Stick it adhesive sheet on the back before cutting it, which made it so much easier at stick the pieces in place. I kept them all in the die and added them one at a time, working across each row so I didn’t get in a muddle!

That looked much better! I finished by heat embossing the sentiment below the balloon – if I’d planned ahead, I should have done this before adding the balloon but, as regular readers of this little blog will recognise, my cards tend to ‘evolve’ as I go along! I got away with it this time.

Thanks for dropping in. It’s been really hot here today – I’d love to have been up in the cooler skies floating along in a hot air balloon instead.