Kathy's Waffle: Welcome Baby

I love this cute elephant image from Funky Hand and have used it to make a fair few cards since it appeared on the Colour Me Happy CD a few years ago now.
It's great to use as a fun Get Well Soon card and I've often used it as with this one, to welcome a new baby. For some reason I always seem to make a shaped card with this image. maybe because it's such a clean, simple design - perfect for someone who isn't particularly neat at cutting out!

This one is about A5 size, made for the folks at Hubby's office to sign and send when one of the team welcomed baby no 3 to their family.

To begin with I printed the spotty patterned paper directly onto a sheet of A4 card, using the "fir to page" option, I turned the card over and chose a plainer design to print on what would be the inside of my card, using the same setting.
Next I cropped the flower design so that there were just a few of the flowers and resized so that each flower would be about 6cm across - this was just done by guesswork. Again I printed the reverse using a plainer design.
Print job no 3 was to resize the spotty pattern so that it just took up half a sheet of the same A4 card -
The final printing task was to select the elephant image and "put" it onto the workspace on the CD, then expand the image to fill as much as possible of the lower half of the workspace. As the full workspace is equivalent to a piece of A4 you can get a good idea how big the print will be.
This was printed and used as a cutting template for the elephant.

I cut around the paper copy of the elephant leaving a little margin all around the edge, then folded the A4 card in half and paper-clipped the paper copy in place - making sure to have the top lying above the fold so that you don't end up with just two, un-joined elephant shapes ;)

I used the A5 piece with the smaller dots just to cut out the head section and glued in place leaving the ear section unstuck, and also the part of the trunk where the ends of the wires will be hidden and sealed safely away

Then I used some black card just to cut the eyelashes piece from the template

For the flowers I cut around a couple of the flower shapes and punched some 1.5cm circles from some of the spare card for the flower centres, and some slightly larger circles to cover the ends of the wire on the reverse.
If you like using card candy, but end up being over-run by packets of the stuff, try making your own, perfectly matching, in-the-size-you-want candy: Use craft punches, die cuts (lots of dies have circles as part of the die cut) etc to cut the circle you need, from exactly the part of a design you want to use (like the spotty one in the centre of the green flower), next simply rub an embossing ball tool on the reverse to create the domed shape.

The wires are twirled around a bamboo skewer, leaving a few cms at each end plain for fixing in place. I'm a bit paranoid about making sure the ends are all made into tight, flat spirals (using pliers) and glued into pieces of paper or card before they are attached to the project - then I add a "cover" of a piece of card to keep everything in place and tidy. On the trunk of this project the wire are concealed and glued with a strong glue inside the two layers of card.

Finally I made a little notice for the elephant to hold by printing the sentiment, cutting it out at an angle and adding it to another piece of scrap card. The ribbon bow just hides and neatens where the wires go inside the elephant's trunk sections.

I used:

Elephant Image from Colour Me Happy CD

Paper designs from Colour Me Happy CD

300gsm white card

Black Bazzill

Green wire

Very narrow pink ribbon