Just in the neck of time

This was a very quick card to welcome Andrew's niece's new baby boy.
The giraffe was cut from yellow gingham paper which I backed with cardboard first.  I knew I wanted to pop it up and the paper needed support.  I've had this medium Sizzix Original giraffe die for years now and I think this is it's first real outing.  The spots were die cut from the same die, and some of them I placed off the edge and snipped them to fit.
The blue plaid background was stamped with one of my favourite stamps - WMS Plaid background.  It's a very versatile stamp but especially good for baby cards I think.
I wanted to personalise the card and had wanted to do bunting across the top of the card.  However as Sebastian is such a long name I couldn't fit it on without changing the card size or layout or both and I was getting short of time by this point so decided on printing a label from the computer.  I stamped a frame from WMS Opera die tag stamps and cut it with the matching die.
I backed the giraffe with a pastry doily and tried laying it on a lemon 5x5 card base but it needed more matting.  I had a piece of the same white hemp weave card stock I had used to stamp the plaid background on, but it wasn't big enough so I punched four squares from it and created a quick and novel matting.  Necessity sometimes leads to ingenuity don't you think !
I did manage at the last minute to cut SEBASTIAN from the same blue card stock using the WPlus9 Folk Art alphabet for the envelope.  No time for a photo though.
I spent the whole morning ironing and packing.  We left at 3 yesterday afternoon to drive to Frankfurt airport and Andrew caught the plane to Australia with our two youngest.  Gavin and I said good bye at about 8pm and we got home last night at half past 11, so I was too tired to post last night.  Lady of leisure today though.