Crafty As L

This week’s project is one that I meant to make last year when I took early retirement but never got around to.  You’d think retiring would give you more time to do stuff but that doesn’t seem to be how it works!  In my job, almost everything we used was set in place in the Ops room.  We didn’t have our own individual spaces, sharing radar screens, desks, keyboards and even pens.  We were issued with our own headsets which many controllers identified as theirs by covering the ear pieces with patterned “knickers”.  Mine were leopard print velour and were home-made, obviously!  My other homemade thing I had was a pager tag, which you put in the pager rack so the Supervisor would know which pager to ring if they wanted to call you back to the sector.  I made a few of these for other controllers to raise funds for charity.  Another of my memorabilia is my Air Traffic Controller’s Licence (the “Yellow Book”) which holds all the validations, ratings, me...

  This week’s card is one I made for one of our trainees after he passed his validation board.   A board is a big deal and is the culmination of several years of classroom learning at the college, simulator training and finally training in the Ops room with live traffic.   Provided you pass, you’re then a fully qualified air traffic controller. I wanted an aviation theme but it's easy to change the theme to whatever you want. For the plane background, I used Lawn Fawn Plane & Simple stamp set and Versamark ink on a black square panel. I repeat stamped the aircraft, banner and sentiment and heat embossed using my homemade mix of gold, silver, bronze and glitter embossing powder. This netutral colour allowed me free reign to choose my coloured glitter card for the letters. Using Julie Hickey Sweet Pea uppercase alphabet dies, I die-cut the required letters from 3 shades of glitter card plus twice from black card to make stacked letters. Once the letters wer...