animal inspired {THANK YOU}

Hi blog friends!  Good morning and happy Saturday to you.  It feels good to be able to catch my breath this morning!  I even had time to assemble my first animal inspired card from our trip to Tanzania, Africa.  It really was such an amazing experience.  Looking through our pictures brings a smile to my face each time.  The animals, the people, the scenery were all so incredible!  I'm sure you will continue to hear that from me for the next few weeks...so much to share!  Well, let's get started, shall we?  My card was inspired by all the beautiful elephants we saw on the trip.  For this card, I used the cute elephant stamp from the Animal Stories stamp set.  And, how cool is this - it's on sale this month for National Scrapbooking month!  You can check out the details on my Demonstrator Website.  {BTW - select stamp sets are 30% off til the end of the month!}  Wanna see my full card?  Here it is:

I had fun creating the background - can you guess what I used?  It's the Tasteful Trim die!  I used the large wavy ric rac and what I did was ran the piece twice through, and aligned the die slightly off set by 1/4" to make a narrower width of the ric rac pattern.  Then I alternated the resulting pieces - narrower and wider - and placed it on a diagonal to create the background.   Then I just trimmed the excess off and viola!  A fun new animal-ish pattern!  I am also into this Basic Gray and Daffodil Delight color scheme.  Just love this combo. Here's the recipe for you:

{Elephant Thanks}

*Stamp Sets: Animal Stories, Curly Cute

*Cardstock:  Basic Gray, Daffodil Delight, Whisper White

*Inks: Basic Gray Classic Ink, Basic Gray and Daffodil Delight Markers

*Accessories: Daffodil Delight Satin Ribbon and Pom Pom ribbon, Neutrals Buttons, Linen Thread, Tasteful Trim Bigz XL die, Scallop Squares Duo Bigz Die

Hope you like the card!  Now, I'll share one of the many inspirational photos we have {we literally took hundreds of photos of these gorgeous animals -no joke!}.  I'm hoping to put together a slideshow of the trip that I'll be posting on the blog, so you'll definitely see more....hopefully soon.  For now, here's a cute baby and momma pic we snapped from the Tarangire National Park for you.  Isn't it so sweet?

Have a fantastic day!  Bye for now!