Digging My Diggers!

Our lovely Godson, Rowan, turned 2 a couple of weeks ago.  He’s into diggers at the mo so when I saw this set, it was a no brainer for a card for him.

To begin, I used Pink Frog masking paper to create a large no.2 mask and used the negative part first.  I was aiming to get it to look like the diggers had excavated the ground to make the number 2.

After blending various shades of brown and splattering some brown, white and black inks to the number for texture, I then masked the ‘2’ and preserved some of the space for other elements before blending the grass.

After removing the masks, I stamped the cones and piles of dirt.  In hindsight, it would have been easier to stamp these first, then mask them!  It was at this point that I realised that the stencils were not designed to colour the stamps.  The stencils worked OK with the piles of dirt but the lorry and diggers didn’t line up at all so I used Sharpie markers to do some basic colouring.  I trimmed the load from the lorry as it was to be a shaker element using glitter.

The next two diggers were to be interactive.  For the digger with the arm, to make the arm move, I coloured and fussy cut 2 diggers and trimmed the arm from one and attached it the panel with a brad, which was then attached to a lever on the back.  I added a piece of tape to secure the legs to the lever and marked the extent of the lever operation so I’d know where to add the foam tape later.

For the bottom digger, I wanted it to slide when pushed so cut a channel, like I did for this card but rather than use two pennies and a circle of foam for the mechanism, I used a strip of foam sandwiched between two pieces of acetate. 

Apologies for the blurred photo.

Foam tape was added all over the back, except where the lever would operate, and then the panel was mounted on a 5¾” square white card base.

Young Rowan loved his card and was even excited about the envelope!

Here’s the card in action.