Rhino Ready

I am on a mission: to be more consistent about my crafting life! I am hoping to be more consistently posting here. The last year has been a literal s#*& show trying to get time to craft, much less work on my blog and posts and content creation. 

This weekend, I decided to use my new Rhino Ready cling stamp set. It is a new offering on Stampin' Up! Not long ago, they started to offer online exclusive products. These products are not available through any catalog, only online. 

Rhino Ready Bundle

Anyways, as I often do, I started by looking online. I typed in Stampin' Up! Rhino Ready, and checked out the images that came up. Even though it is a very new set, there were already a lot of posts of other people's work. I looked around a bit, got an idea (not actually one that someone had made, but it was spurred by their work), and started by choosing some patterned paper. You might see me using the term DSP because that is what Stampin' Up! calls theirs, and face it - old habits die hard. 

I took the paper, found some pre-cut card bases that I had in my stash that would work with it, and got started. Part of the reason that I bought the set was that I really liked the dies for it. I have been more conscious about which dies I buy because I am quite capable to fussy cut, and I also bought a cutting machine that will scan any image I stamp and cut it out for me. The trees from this set got me though, and I had to do it. I took out some scrap papers in the right colours for the trees, the ground cover, and even found a grey that would work for the rhino itself. Less colouring meant less work for me!

I precut the tree pieces using the dies, and then stamped, coloured and cut the rhinos as well. I did all this before I even put one card together. I figured I would cut out a bunch, and then work on assembling them once I had the pieces. I assembled the card bases and mats en mass so that all I had to do was the fun part - putting the pictures together. 

I decided to do some vertically, some horizontally, and even switched up the patterned paper and colour combinations. I didn't have enough of one of the colours to use as a mat, so I improvised a bit and made it a layer underneath the vanilla cardstock. I think they all turned out great. Each one is different, and I even used different sentiments and got some birthday cards as well as more generic ones for all occasions. Don't forget to work on the inside of the card. On this one, I added a sentiment and also used one of the stamps from the set to make grass across the bottom of the card.