Hi, crafty friends. Today’s card was a very enjoyable one to make, I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun putting a card together! I’ve used two new digi sets from Lili of the Valley, and I had an absolute blast creating this!!

As I mentioned, I created this card using two collections: Cute Creatures 1 and Cute Creatures 2. You can also get a bundle with both at a discount. There are 93 cute creatures in one set, so if you buy both you get a total of 186! These are easy to color, and they’ve thought of every animal under the sun. There are snakes, butterflies, monkeys, reindeer, hedgehogs, hyenas, bears, penguins, toucans, dinosaurs, frogs, cows and loads more – basically everything. I didn’t want to go the obvious route and choose the penguins (there are 3 penguins across the two sets), so I opted for other critters that live in and around the sea. I went through both sets, added all the sea creatures into a photoshop file and shrunk them all down to about 40% size. I wanted them tiny, and they’re originally about 2″, so a decent size and easy to color. The size I made, which was about 3/4″ was a bit finicky to color and to fussy cut, but I really enjoyed the process.

Once I had all my sea creatures colored and fussy cut, I put them aside and worked on the rest of the card. I die cut the Stamp Border from Gummiapan five times from Powder cardstock from Concord & 9th. The die cuts five postage stamps in a border, but I cut off one, making it a strip of four. I put two layers of white scraps behind each of the individual postage to give it a floating look. I also cut down small cardstock squares two layers thick to put behind my critters, also giving them a bit of dimension, but not as much as foam tape would add.

Once I knew how I wanted my strips of sea postage arranged, I stamped a sentiment from the Småtekster stamp set from Norsk Stempelblad AS using Capri ink from Concord & 9th directly on my card base, which I created from Stamper’s Select White cardstock from Papertrey Ink. I made a side fold card this time that is 1/2″ larger in both directions than the standard A2 card. I adhered my postage stamps, added some dew drops from Concord & 9th that kind of look like bubbles and decided to make their eyes shine. I used a black glaze pen, then went over with one small dot of an extra fine white Sharpie once the black was dry. I don’t think I’ve ever used 20 images on one card before, but this was SO. MUCH. FUN!!