Cool Little Dude Card

Hello lovely people in blog land :) I hope that life is treating you kindly and you are all safe and well? I haven't had much time for blogging so far this month, we've undertaken a large DIY project this month. It started with just laying a new carpet in our bedroom and morphed in to getting new plug sockets and lighting installed, fixing all the squeaky floorboards and decorating the room, before we put the carpet down!

I'm using the time that everything has been boxed and bagged up to do some de-cluttering and redistribution, books to both Cats protection and the local National Trust book shop and clothes to a local charity shop. I really cannot believe how much clutter and things we have in our home that have been bought but never used or worn! I'm sure it will all be worthwhile when we're finished but at the minute the house looks like a bomb has gone off lol!

Until today I couldn't get at my craft desk because things from out of our room had been put in my crafting room, so there was no free desk space, but as I've boxed and bagged things up over the past few days, I've made some space to be able to get my craft on! I've been saying for a while now that I wanted to add more cards for the menfolk in my life to my box of made cards. So when a lady in a group I belong to on Facebook posted a card using this cool little dude I was smitten and knew I wanted to use the image to create a card or two (most likely more because he's such a cool little dude).

The images are meant to be used with a die from the latest issue of the Tattered Lace magazine which is issue 60, sadly I haven't been able to find the magazine locally yet, but the images and backgrounds can currently be downloaded from the Tattered Lace website. The Little Dude is available in 5 different colour combinations with colour co-ordinated backing papers. Once I'd downloaded the images and printed off the colour I wanted to use I carefully fussy cut out the Little Dude and added some card stock to the back of the paper to give him a little more substance. I used brown, black and burgundy markers to trace around the edge of the dude to hide any cutting imperfections.

I have to say I am impressed with the cutting I did on this image. I'm getting a lot better at fussy cutting and I think that is down to the scissors I use. My fussy cutting has always until recently been a bit hit and miss, but last year I invested in a pair of Fiskar's Softouch Spring Action Micro-Tip scissors, they are the dogs doodah's as far as fussy cutting goes, they are very comfortable to use and very easy to control.

As there wasn't much to do to this card because of how colourful the little dude and backing papers were I wanted to add some little touches. I used a Versamarker watermark pen to add some gold embossing powder to the little dude's chain and some Tonic Crystal Glaze to his shades. The sentiment is from a set of stamps that came with issue 52 of Creative Stamping magazine. I stamped the image with Versamark on to black card stock and used the same WOW Metallic Gold Rich Super Fine embossing powder that I'd used for his chain and then fussy cut the image out. I used a metallic gold sharpie around the edge of the cut out image to hide any little imperfections.

I used some 300gsm Purple Cardstock that I got from Limetree Crafts at the NEC, its an absolutely gorgeous shade, I've used it to make some Christmas cards and to make a Fairy themed card. The card base I made is tent fold and I added a mat of gold metallic card on to the purple then added the printed backing paper on top of that. I added the little dude and the sentiment to the front of the card using some 3D foam pads and popped some star shaped gems to the front from my stash of gems and bling and voila the card was complete.

I have to say the hardest part of this card was finding a sentiment, I wanted a 'cool dude' phrase but I don't seem to have anything like it, so I'll have to acquire something soon. I'm hoping to find the die at some point in the not to distant future, but for now I can continue to fussy cut the little dudes to make more cards!