Just Monkeying Around

I can say with out a doubt today I made the best card I have ever made! It started off that I was going to make a birthday card for a one year old. First I selected the stamp set I wanted to use, Monkey Business... then I sat down at my desk and stared at the unmounted stamp set waiting for an idea to "pop" into my head.... nothing. "OK," I thought to myself, "I'll mount the set, something will come to me," and it did! About a year ago I made a pop-up style card with frogs. So I have an idea... the easy part is over!

Some images Copyright Stampin' Up

Stamps: SU Monkey Business, Forrest Foliage, Do the Hula, Flashy Fl orals, EK Success Script Alphabet (lowercase & uppercase)
Paper: SU Chocolate Chip, Very Vanilla, Summer Sun

Ink: SU Mellow Moss, Always Artichoke, Garden Green, Old Olive, Handsome Hunter, Certainly Celery, Craft Garden Green,

Craft Summer Sun, Craft Chocolate Chip, Craft Close to Cocoa

Accessories: SU Dimensionals, Pop dots

Wow did I use a lot!

I will post a template and tutorial shortly.

I started by tracing out my template on onto my very vanilla card stock, yes that started of as very vanilla. I sponged on the background then started stamping with the lighter shades of green to the darker shades layer by layer to achieve a deep jungle look. My top layer was in garden green which I embossed to make it stick out. I wish I had better jungle foliage stamps, if I did my jungle would have looked a bit better!

I then made my monkeys, also heat embossing them and using my water color wonder crayons (I love those!) to color them in.

The bananas were fun! I wanted them to look more realistic than the plain yellow bananas did so I used a paint brush to spot on some brown spots. Then I heat embossed the bananas, cut them out and attached all my creations to the jungle scene.

Almost done! All I needed now was some kind of sentiment. It needed to be something good. I couldn't just say "happy birthday." I needed something to follow the theme of the card. What could be better than, "It's your birthday... go bananas!!" So I stamped it up, free handed by the way. Now what? It was too boring, although nicely embossed it was to plain to add to card. So I used my aqua painter to wet the edges of the paper and I torn them up with my scissors. Still boring. Even though I used very vanilla the paper was too bright. So I ran my close to cocoa and chocolate chip craft inks over the torn up edged, covered in clear embossing power and heated it up. Almost there... still a little to bright. I took a paint brush and thought to myself, "please don't ruin this!" (At this time it is 1am and I don't want to redo the sentiment, I'm ready to lay down) used my close to cocoa craft ink on the brush and dirtied up the face of the sentiment. Beautiful! Oh wait, there are some brush marks. So I press down a bit harder to try to blend in the marks with new ink... and what happens? Old ink in the brush starts to come off that I couldn't see before. Green ink (sage shadow I think). OH NO! Now I have a green spot! GRRRR! I wasn't happy. I really didn't want to redo it. Then I took a long look and decided it looked really good. So I strategically brushed the green ink over the sentiment as well. Taped it up and wala! The inside is done.

One last little touch... the front of the card! Nothing to show. It's a heat embossed monkey in the lower right corner, simple. No reason to draw your eyes to the front of the card when the beauty is within!

You don't know how bad I wanted to wake Todd up to show him! I did show some restraint and let him sleep. I guess it can wait till morning to show him.

Enjoy and come back. I will post a template and tutorial on how to make the base of the pop-up soon.