Dani's Simple Greetings: Australiana

GUMNUT BABIES CARD

A Little Piece of an Australian Childhood

Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by Mae Gibbs is one of my all-time favourite books. Even now as a grown up, I quite happily read it to myself at least once a year - it's just such sweet and beautiful story-telling. And the illustrations, also by Mae Gibbs, are also magic :)

I did have to search hard for these stamps and it was some time ago so I honestly can't remember where I got them. But Google can find some amazing things! That said, you could find other stamps all over the place of just gumnuts and other Australiana that you could incorporate into this style of card. It's a very basic design so you could do anything!

First of all, on watercolour card, stamp your image with StazOn black ink. Use watercolour technique to colour it (or whatever kind of colouring you want really! Trim the card up (I trimmed mine so that the branch of the gumleaves would appear to continue off the page), round the edges if you want to, and ink the edges. I have inked with a nice olive colour.

Next, punch three holes in the bottom right corner of the image. You could of course use a regular hole punch, however I like the more therapeutic method of whacking a special punch with a hammer!! These tools are part of an eyelet setting tool kit.

Using either twine, string or thread - fold your twine in half and poke the loop through the hole so that it comes out the front of the card.

Now poke the straggly bits through the loop and pull gently until it looks like the picture below:

Repeat for all three holes. Don't trim the twine yet - wait until the card is assembled so you can gauge how long you want them to be.

Now gather the other parts of your card. Backing card, which I am doing in a nice olive/gumleaf green. I trimmed this to be 5mm wider all around than the gumnut baby card and rounded the corners on it also. Ink the edges in a similar colour to give that slightly "shadowed" effect.

Also have your folded card ready. It needs to be a cenimetre taller and about 2.5 - 3cm wider than your green backing card.

Assemble the card, as above, using double-sided tape. Keep to the left side so that the amount of card around the green is even above, left and below. There needs to be an "excess" to the right.