I was inspired to make a shaker card – my first outside of a class I think – by the sketch at this week’s Freshly Made Sketches.

Here’s the banner which inspired my card

I decided to change the orientation of the card because I wanted a die cut word for my sentiment since it would be going over the window sheet circle. The whole window sheet made me think of a fish bowl which is where the fish from Seaside Shore became a part of the card! I love the By The Shore DSP and this one looks so much like water, getting darker as you get further from the surface. So with all the decisions made, it was all about construction.

I used my circles dies to cut the aperture and then a larger one to cut a circle of the window sheet. This I glued to the back of my piece of very vanilla using fast fuse. Next I stamped the fish from Seaside Shore in archival basic black, coloured their stripes with a daffodil delight marker and then cut out them out. About this time, my friend Bilma stopped by and I learned that someone that I worked with about 15 years ago is about to retire. So this card was perfect and will go to Joe on his retirement.

I cut a piece of the By The Shore DSP that would fit under the top very vanilla layer, ensuring that it was big enough so that you don’t see any of the base of the card at the edges. I glued on the daffodil delight die cut congrats before positioning the fish since I didn’t want them under the word. Next I glued on the fish. After using the foam adhesive strips, I’m a firm believer in shaker cards. Previously it was hard to build the wall to keep the sequins in, but now with the bendable foam adhesive strips, it’s easy. I easily made a circular wall, used the embossing buddy to ensure the edges weren’t sticky (looks like I needed to do more of that) and then picked out the small sequins from a tin of two sizes and snowflakes from the holiday catalogue back in 2014. All that was left was to take the backing off the foam strips and fix the top layer to the rest of the card. In the event, I actually used dimensionals for the parts of the card not next to the opening and that was an error since they are about half the height of the foam strips. Next time, I’ll just use more of the strips for the rest of the card.

Here’s another view, with the card carefully propped up to show that there really are a lot of sequins in it!

I added another fish to the envelope so that it coordinated with the card. I’m definitely going to be making some more shaker cards soon, they are really fun to make and they are fun to look at too.

See you tomorrow,

Liz