Rancid Bat Breath Card

 It’s sunny but with a pretty cool to cold wind today. We worked in the garden yesterday and found out how out of shape we are for physical work….didn’t bother going out there again today. Our bodies reminded us that we are definitely senior citizens! Apparently riding bikes and hiking trails do not make you fit to dig in the garden!

This will be Halloween card number two…totally different than the last one. When I opened my container of Halloween paper, I was shocked at how little I had left. The only craft store we have here is Micheal’s which is a pretty poor store for card making and scrapbooking. I was there last week to get some envelopes, which they didn’t have, and they had NO STAMPS at all. Can you imagine a craft store that doesn’t carry stamps? The clerk said they may be getting more in. Yeah right! So, without expecting they would have Halloween paper, I thought I might as well try before ordering on-line. They had no 6” or 8” paper packs but they did have some 12” ones. I flipped through a couple and thought, “Wow! They are carrying Tim Holtz stuff again!” NOPE. These were Michael’s Reflections line but so much like Tim Holtz paper it was eerily similar. They were even on sale, buy one get one free. so I took advantage of that for sure.

So, besides paper sheets they had some very large tags that were 4” x 6”. I like to embellish cards instead of just gluing on one so I’m going to show you how the tag looked from the book and how I actually used it.

From the book it was like this.

 

And this is my finished card.

                     
    I had no plan at all for this card, as usual. I just winged it and added and deleted many things before I settled on the finished card. First thing I did was to cut out the large oval out around the hanging bat and sponged the edges in black - I hate white edges so everything I hand cut was sponged in black or had a black pen dragged around the edges. The bat itself was a little dull so I put some Distress Black Soot ink on a block; spritzed it with water and used a paint brush to add some deeper black. I had some card bases on hand that were 6.75 x 5 (odd size I know) but I decided to use them up. The background paper is from one of the paper packs and it was cut to fit the entire card base.

The words under the bat were outlined in a black Bic pen so they stood out a bit. I hand cut the ‘warning’ and ‘toxic’ and inked the edges. I had some large ghosts already die cut but they were too large, so I went for a smaller one. This small ghost is from a different Tim Holtz die set. The skeleton is another Sizzix/TH die - piddly to assemble but very cool when finished….very dimensional. If you don’t like doing puzzles, you will not like these dies. I stamped the ‘foolish mortals’ on a piece of paper from original tag.

I started assembling the bits and decided the oval was too large, so I cut it down to just around the bat - and inked the edges black. The background needed to something else to break it up so a 2” piece of paper, also from the paper pack, was die cut and glued to the right side but not to the edge. The skeleton needed something to stand on or he would look like he was floating so I cut off a piece of the spider strip that was part of the paper pack. The ‘warning’ and ‘toxic’ labels were glued on. The ‘foolish mortals’ was added by a dimensional glue strip, so it stood out more.

This was NOT a quick and easy card, but I certainly enjoyed making it….. and the ones I will be posting later this week. Things are slowing down no, so I’ll be posting more often again.

That’s all for Saturday, October 1, 2022.

Cheers

Violet

PS: To save a card to your Pinterest account, simply hover over the image until the ‘Pin It” symbol appears and then click…it sometimes takes a few seconds. This will take you to your own Pinterest account to save the card.