Thank you for a special teacher

Recently while looking for inspiration, I stumbled upon a wonderful sketch at Sketch'n'Stash.  It seemed perfect for what I wanted to do which was make a thank you card for Simon's teacher which included alpha and numeric images to represent the hard work she's put into teaching him to read and count these last 2 years.

Sketch'n'Stash also sets the other challenge of using your newest and/or neglected stash items.  I'm a great one for collecting stamp sets and die cuts and paper stacks and not using them.  I have wonderful plans for them when I buy them but alas they remain just that - plans.  So I hope to visit this blog often in the future with the aim of forcing me to realize some of those plans.

I recently ordered a Folk Art Alphabet die from WPlus9.  The 28 characters (& and ! are included) come wired together but can be easily separated if you so wish.  When it first arrived I had no particular use in mind so I just die cut a complete alphabet to try it out.  Afterwards, the negative caught my eye, it reminded me of an old fashioned stencil, and I thought it could make a good element for a card - particularly as the end of school year was drawing ever closer.  I did a little fiddling with the die and removed some of the letters so I could die cut a neat rectangle (the right side was uneven and had to be covered with ribbon but the top left and bottom were neat).  I adhered this die cut rectangle to some acetate and added the missing bits from the "A", the "B", "O" and "R".  

While at a craft fair a year or two ago I bought a wonderful little stamp called The Number Game from Technique Tuesday.  I did some playing around with it when I first got it home but hadn't ever really put it to good use.  For this card, I stamped it with Versamark and embossed with Clearsnap Pistachio embossing powder.  Just for the heck of it I die cut it with a Spellbinders Labels 8 die (another underused stash item).  I like how you can see through the letters to the numbers underneath.

The butterflies were punched with what was probably one of the first stash tools I ever bought.  It certainly is one of my oldest punches.  I now have several butterfly dies but they were all too big for this project.  I overstamped the butterflies with a text stamp from Crafty Individuals using Versamark.  I was going to emboss with the Pistachio embossing powder but I preferred the tone on tone look of the Versamark alone.

The little thank you tag was stamped with two stamps from the Waltzing Mouse Opera Tag Stamps set and cut with the matching die set.

The papers were all from a freebie paper stack which came with a recent edition of Cardmaking and Papercraft called Spring Jubilee from Pink Paislee.  I distressed nearly all elements with Worn Lipstick Distress Ink.

I hope you like it - I'm rather pleased with how it turned out.