My hubby gave me an early birthday gift, which allowed me to take part in the Weekender Retreat held by Spellbinders. This exclusive kit is an amazing one and I enjoyed the 15 hours of participation, although I didn’t actually create anything during the tutorials. I did this retreat last year and by accident my kit was late, meaning that I couldn’t prepare die cutting for the event. That experience made me realize that for me, it is better to watch, learn and create later. Therefore this year I made no attempt at homework and just watched to learn.

One of the things I noticed when reading some of the chat, was that so many participators seemed to get hung up on following exactly what the demonstrator showed that they forgot to be creative in their own way. Some even complained that the kit didn’t have all the colour card stock shown in the booklet. The booklet clearly states that not every thing used in the tutorials was available in the kit.

I already knew I wanted to create the jungle cat, but I also didn’t want to be cutting up my new and beautiful card stock to do it. So I went to my scrap envelopes and pulled out various bits to use. My cat uses a shiny dark brown background piece with a muted but metallic gold overlay and some cream shimmery scrap for the chest, stomach and face. I was just curious to see how he would turn out and I cut and put him together during a break between sessions. I was quite pleased with how he turned out. In the next break period I went searching for the leafy frame die which I thought was from Hero Arts, now part of the Spellbinders family, but is in fact from MFT. I decided to use this although I could have used quite a lot of dies from the kit and got something similar in design. Once it was cut I added some foam tape along the edges and underneath the leaves. The white of the foam tape was showing in a couple of places so I used a black sharpie and went around the edges that showed and then I attached it to the card front. With two dies from the kit I cut a cloud and the sun and added them behind the frame. And I had the little flowers made in a tray and decided to use them rather than cut others. These flowers come from last years Weekender kit and all I had to add was the flower centers which I did with enamel dots. The sentiment is from this years kit which includes the stamps and matching dies. Once I had this done all I needed to do was situate my Cheetah and foam dimension helped me get him to look good. A couple of tiny black gems for the eyes and the card was complete.

My card fits the masculine challenge at Inspirational – Challenge #368 – Word Prompt – For the Guys so I am entering it there.