Congratulations Cliff the Stork

A few days ago I posted a card which was inspired by The Crafty Stamper'.  When I visited The Colour of Love's website to purchase Georgie Giraffe, I was struck by the number of really cute baby images they had, so I purchased another.

This image is called Cliff the Stork and, once again I took my inspiration from the stunning card made by Carol The Crafty Stamper. However, I could not faithfully reproduce her design because my stash of dies is very different to hers. Why is it that, no matter how many dies you have, you never seem to have the one you want?

Before making my card I spent the better part of the day sorting through all of my dies to see exactly what I had which I could use with this card.  This process left me asking myself three questions .....

•  i) why do we crafters buy so many dies, especially the nesting ones? 
• ii) I have tried several different ways of storing my dies and nothing seems to work that well so, when you have so many, what is the best way to store them? and 
• iii) why do these little bits of metal weigh so much? (My arms and shoulders ached so much after lifting those heavy boxes.)

At the start of this tidying up process I had all of my dies in one large box , admittedly there were a few new ones which had not made it to the box, and the box had burst it's seams.  I tapped up the box and then started re-stacking the dies, I could not get them all into the box.  I then hit on the idea of attaching all of the nesting dies to those magnetic sheets and putting them into a ring binder.  I still could not get the remaining dies into my big box.  My die and embossing folder stash now fill one ring binder, an extra strong box which started it's life as a Christmas hamper (I think that did mention that it was a big box) and three shoe box sized boxes and I still do not have the dies I wanted to make this card!

I coloured Cliff the Stork with Promarkers and picked out one or two places with Glossy Accents.  The dies are Spellbinders and Transer and the ribbon is from Really Reasonable Ribbons.  I used two different coloured inks to distress the edges of the card and the blue backing paper is pearlised - unfortunately, you cannot really see that here.

(I am sure there must be a way to turn this photograph the right way up but I cannot for the life of me figure out how.)

If you are not familiar with The Crafty Stamper's work, may I suggest that you take a few minutes to go there now, it is packed full of awe-inspiring designs.  

Have a good day and thank you for visiting my blog.

Dionne