In The Pink Birthday Card

This birthday card was made for a very dear friend I haven’t seen for over a year due to coronavirus. She actually sent me most of the things I used on this card for my birthday so I thought it fitting to make a card for her!

The starting point was a sheet of clear stamps with some popular cute animals - alpaca, flamingo, meerkat and giraffe - and matching sentiments. The animal stamps were all from  the neck up at an angle where it would work best with the animals coming out from the side of the card, so I used a tall thin card blank. I put the flamingo near the top and stamped him in black ink then coloured in with a pink Promarker pen. The matching sentiment said ‘hope this finds you in the pink!’

I then added an alpaca, since I like alpacas and that’s a good enough reason, popping his head out from the other side of the card. One of the other sentiments was perfect to add next to him: ‘miss you!’. I added a couple of highlights with the same pink pen.

I toyed with the idea of adding a happy birthday sticker but decided it wouldn’t look right and I needed to stamp the message. I added a few strokes of pink pen around it to add a bit of colour.

A final touch was two sections of washi tape from a pack the same friend gave me for my birthday; one says ‘happy birthday’ on it and the other ‘lots of love’. Hopefully I will get to see my friend soon!

Let's go on an Adventure - Alpaca my bags! Handmade card

I'm a big fan of alpacas - and even had them at my wedding - so when I saw a card making magazine on sale where the cover gift was a set of animal stamps including alpacas, I had to have them! It also came with some fun sentiments to go with the different animals including this one: Let's go on an
adventure - alpaca my bags! Probably my favourite alpaca pun :-)

To make this card I started with a background paper of pink and blue hearts. I then stamped the alpaca onto a piece of pink card and mounted it onto a piece of blue card with scalloped edging (a die-cut) and stuck it at a jaunty angle on the card. I followed the pink and blue theme with two die-cut balloons and stamped the sentiment onto a piece of pink card. I used some little pink gems in the four corners of the sentiment box to make it look like it had been fixed onto the card.

I'm sharing this with the Library Challenge where the theme is 'Five weeks in a balloon' and
Penny Black - 'summer colours'.

Alpaca First Anniversary Card for my Husband

I have a bit of a thing about alpacas - they're so cute with their thick curly coats and crazy fringes that either make them look like a visit to the hairdresser went wrong, or they went in asking for the same style as Mimi Labonq from Allo Allo.




I like them so much that part of my hen night involved alpaca trekking and we even had alpacas at our wedding - just milling around during the afternoon reception amid the guests!

I had a birthday present this year from my friend and her daughter, where her daughter chose a couple of things to give me including a sheet of alpaca stickers. A month or so later when I came to thinking about an anniversary card for my husband I decided it ought to include alpacas and remembered the stickers.

The theme of the first wedding anniversary is 'paper' so I was always going to make my husband a hand made card, but I wanted it to be very 'us' and not just something generic with hearts and teddy bears. Alpacas are just as cute and cuddly anyway!

There was one large alpaca sticker on the sheet I was given, along with a few tiny alpacas, bees and an apple (do alpacas eat apples? I'm not sure!). The main alpaca was so big it would have taken up most of a standard A5 card blank and not left much room for a sentiment, so I used a giant A4 card blank.

 

I covered it with pink and red spotted paper as this seemed appropriate for an anniversary and printed the sentiments on the computer, then added the stickers. Easy to make though the sentiments took a bit of thinking about - it's a bit daft but then so am I, at least when it comes to cute animals, and luckily my husband knows that and loves me for it!

I'm sharing this with Ooh La La Creations as their theme this week is anniversary.

Alpaca Cookies and Alpaca Adventure, Dorset



 

I wouldn't say I'm alpaca-mad... I just have an alpaca cuddly toy, an alpaca hat, a scarf made from alpaca wool, alpaca writing paper, stickers and post-it notes, and a bag that says "alpaca bag" (geddit?). Oh and some alpaca cookie cutters.

 

So it perhaps wasn't surprising that when my friends and my sister came to organise my hen night that they decided alpacas should be involved! There's a place very close to my wedding venue called Alpaca Adventure, run by the very hard-working Wendy (and I think her husband) who has a full time day job as well as running a farm with over 30 alpaca plus sheep, hens and a pig. She takes the alpacas to competitions and has won several rosettes for effectively 'best in class' and sells the wool to a mill which uses it to make clothing.

 

She also does alpaca walking, which means you can basically go and walk an alpaca round a field on a lead. It sounds a bit random, and perhaps it is, but it's great fun!

 

First we fed some lambs, then we petted the pig, then got introduced to our alpacas - mine was a gorgeous guy called Teddy Edward. They each wore a bridal and we basically went for a walk for about 45 minutes around a field, leading our alpacas who were very sweet and docile, if occasionally trying to stop and munch some grass or sniff each other's bums.

 

 

Look at this dude!

This is what alpaca walking looks like

It's also pretty inexpensive and only cost £10 each - not bad given I imagine it costs a lot to keep the animals! The only thing I would say is that if you are booking this as a surprise for someone's birthday or hen night, make sure you tell Wendy that it's a secret - I'd actually met her at an event and she let the cat (alpaca?) out of the bag that I was coming here for my hen night even though I wasn't supposed to know!

After my hen night I wrote my friends some little thank you notes as it seemed a good excuse to use my alpaca writing paper! My fiancé got me this for Christmas - he knows me so well :-)

I also thought it was a good opportunity to use the alpaca cookie cutters he got me at the same time!

Here are my cutters:

I used a basic sugar cookies recipe and rolled out the dough and cut out the shapes

Ready to go in the oven

And here they are. These could easily be llamas and I think they could pass for giraffes too, but if you look at the necks, I think you can see the fatness that suggests the big fluffy wool of an alpaca.

I made up some royal icing as I wanted to recreate the thick wool of the alpacas, but I got the quantities slightly wrong and the icing wouldn't set enough and even though I piped it in dots, they all ran together. Still, you get the idea! I gave these to two of my bridesmaids when they came up the weekend after the hen night for their dress fittings as a nice reminder of the hen night!