The sentiment stamp on this card has been cracking me up ever since I first saw it in the sneak peeks from the Kraftin’ Kimmie blog.

I finally broke down and ordered myself some pirates. And the Tea Party set too! When I fall, I fall hard. This is a (very) belated birthday card for P’s mum, so inside I stamped ‘Well blow me down!’ from the same set.

The craft fair yesterday was a bit slow, but I was ok with that because I’d stamped up tons of pirate and tea party images, and I spent most of the fair colouring. It wasn’t slow enough that I’m worried about the two other fairs I booked in to this month – if nothing else, I’ll get tons more colouring done!

P’s mum is also having eye surgery tomorrow, so he requested that I give the pirate an eyepatch. I stole this one from Billy Blythe, one of the other pirate stamps I bought – I coloured just the patch, then carefully cut it out, leaving the ‘strings’ very long. Once I decided where it would go on Alicia’s face, I marked where I needed to cut the ends of the strings. Then I cut them off, and used a black Sharpie to colour them in. I wanted them to look like stamped lines, like the lines of the rest of the stamp. Then I used a tiny glue pen to put glue on it, and put it in place.

The sketch for this card is from Sketch Saturday. I have to say, I loved having my choice of images ready to go, just having to pick papers to go with it! The challenge on the Kraftin’ Kimmie blog is to use beads, so I made that side stripe by putting down some 1/4″ Scor-tape (double-sided tape), then pouring some green microbeads on to it. CCEE Stampers has an inspiration challenge going on right now, and the inspiration is ‘Caviar’. Microbeads look like exactly that! Only less slimy.