Wonderful Gift

Hello my crafty friends!  I hope that everyone enjoyed a lovely holiday weekend, I know that I did!  In the last week since I returned from Miami, I have been to the Homossasa Wildlife Park and on an airboat ride out through the St. Martens keys off the coast near Homossasa.  Both were spectacular, so much fun and the weather was amazing! I have loaded a couple of pics from the week which I tried to put at the end of the post, but they have ended up right in the middle of my card pics!  They weren't playing nice and didn't want to move! Sorry about that!

  I haven't gotten a lot of crafting done this week, but I hope to play catch up this week.  Here is a lovely little card that I made for the last shows I did in March.  I started with the sky blue card and cut an aperture in the top of it using one of the dies from the Radiant Rectangle set.  On the bottom of the piece, I cut a triple border using the lattice insert from the Bracket Border die set.  I used the cutting edge on the bottom to give my background a pretty defined edge.  Next I stamped my Flower Frame Stamp To Die For using a Black Archival ink pad on to coconut white card.  I lined it up with the aperture opening and used the bracket border cutting edge on the bottom so it just peeked out from beneath the blue top piece.   I added mounting foam to the back of the blue piece to raise it for a dramatic effect.  I tied a piece of black silky crush ribbon around it and added a double bow to the side.  A pearl embellishment and stick pins were added as accents.  I stamped my sentiment on coconut white card and cut it out with the oval from the Radiant Rectangle set.  I added in the next smaller die during the embossing phase to add a bit of pretty detail to it.  I inked the edge of it very lightly with Stormy Sky and mounted it on foam inside my aperture opening, adding some flat back pearls as accents to the sentiment and the corners of my background.  To complete the card, I added a black mat for balance before my final double white mats with the pierced inner mat. Hope you like it!   Finished dimensions are 7" x 8" in size.

Homossassa is known for it's manatees.  Even though January is the time of year that there are in greatest number here, I saw about a dozen of them in the bay as well as these that were at the wildlife park.  The water here was easier to photograph them.  These are about 6 feet in length, not too large by manatee standards!

While on the airboat ride, we also saw some playful dolphins!  They were swimming right near us but you had to be so quick to get a pic of them as they only surface briefly.  Looks a bit like a shark in my pic since all you see is the fin!








This next pic was actually taken when I was in Miami.  This was the cocktail that was being served at the table next to us at dinner.  I just could not believe my eyes when they brought it!  I'm not sure what keeps the two Corona beers from falling, but this thing was absolutely massive!  Pretty creative though!  The couple each had one and still hadn't emptied all the beer out of the bottles by drinking enough of the drink by the time we finished dinner!  He said it was called a "Bullfrog" (I haven't a clue why!).  The rim of the glass was about 6 inches across, massive I say!                                      
                                                                                                             And finally the card pics are below!                                  All for now, Sue x