Crafty As L

  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...

Working in the aviation industry, I do like to have a few plane-themed stamps and dies and I splashed out on the Flyby Greetings from Spellbinders after seeing a couple of great cards on Instagram. There’s a lot of die-cutting to begin with and some of the bits are quite fiddly! Once you start assembling though, they come together quickly. There are two sizes of clouds in the set which can easily be used for a background.   I supplemented the clouds with a little ink blending using my homemade cloud stencil. For a little dimension, I adhered thin foam tape behind the aircraft and the banner. To finish the card, I added a few white highlights, some enamel dots and matted and layered the panel using the same colour card I’d used for the die-cutting. This one was made with the opposite colour scheme.    

These days, when you buy a voucher for someone, particularly if it’s purchased online, you get an emailed voucher for you to print out.  Giving someone a sheet of paper for a gift is not very inspiring!  So, when my friend and colleague, Stu, retired recently, I was asked to create a presentation folder for said sheet of paper.  Inspired by the London skyline pop-up card I made my friend a few weeks ago, I decided to try an air traffic pop-up card.  I made it airfield themed, even though we are Area Controllers, as an Area Control building is not quite as interesting or recognisable as a control tower! First, for the front of the card, I repeat stamped and heat embossed the bi-plane and clouds from Avery Elle’s ‘Fly By’ stamp set and stacked several die-cut ‘congrats’.  I popped one of the bi-planes up on foam tape. To begin the inside, I cut out a control tower, some random airport buildings, a city skyline, some fighter aircraft, smoke trails, an ...