Brave Vikings

Good morning, crafty friends! I hope you had a wonderful weekend. We had a wonderful family Easter with lots of good food and fun. Instead of the traditional egg hunt, I borrowed a fabulous idea from a friend. I filled plastic eggs with coins and buried them. Then we used Mike’s metal detector to find them yesterday. Amelia ended up with over $5.00 in coins and got extra math practice counting them.

I learned a few things after our adventure. First, if there’s only one child, 22 eggs is too many. After about a dozen or so, Amelia got a little tired. The metal detector is a bit heavy, so our plan was to have her wear the headphones and her dad carry the detector. Amelia, of course, declared she was quite strong enough to carry it – and she is. But after awhile, she needed a little break.

Another thing I didn’t think about when I was burying eggs was that there are other metal objects in the yard – like fences – that interfere with the hunt. And no matter how good the map is, there will still be an egg or two that don’t get found. I think I know where one might be, but the last one is proving very elusive. I thought I was keeping track of which ones we didn’t find, but, apparently, I missed at least one. We should have checked off the ones we found.

Meanwhile, in my crafting world, we also have some adventure. For our challenge for our May meeting, we traded stamp sets that were continuing. Our challenge is to create a card for the challenge and one for the stamp set owner using the new (to us) stamp set. The Brave Vikings set isn’t carrying over to the new Stampin’ Up!® annual catalog, but it’s one I’ve been wanting to buy. My friend Chris brought it just in case someone wanted to use it, so I snatched it up. So far, I’ve only made one card with it (hey, I was burying two dozen plastic eggs!), but I had a lot of fun!

I stamped the Vikings in Tuxedo Black Memento Ink, then colored with Stampin’ Blends. The female Viking was easy to die-cut with the Stitched Rectangle Dies, but the male was a little trickier. I didn’t want to use a huge die that would cut all of the image, so I used the “Out of the Box” technique. Basically, you lay the die over the image, and mark areas that are outside the die. You only need to fussy cut the part that doesn’t fit in the die. Then, making sure the cut out portion is on top of the die, you can die-cut the rest with no problem.

I cut the sentiment in pieces and added portions on each die-cut, then finished it at the bottom of the card.  I added a little twine around the card (I am sure this is retired, but it seemed to go with the colors and mood of the card) and a few Rhinestone Waves Basic Jewels.

Thanks for stopping by Stamping with Buffy. Have a lovely day!

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