engineering is sooooooo not my thang, baby!

which is why the new challenge at shopping our stash, "side by side" had me wigging out for most of last week. 'cause the brief is to make a step card. which i had never done, but suspected i would find extremely challenging. and i was right. but i did it. and then discovered that the construction is nothing in comparison to trying to photograph the finished card. so it was a week of MUCH LEARNING. which is nice, right? here's my card:

the ingredients for this are a triumph of ancient stash usage! all paper is scraps (!) by sei, basic grey, ki memories and creative imaginations; the lawn fawn stamp set, "critters in the sea" is dated 2010, but maybe came to me a year or two after that?; the "sun" is a badge sticker from a very old october afternoon sheet of cardstock stickers; the kelly purkey simon says stamp alphas were a gift (in several colors) from the lovely and lamented leslie hanna; i guess the newest thing on this card is the eyelet outlet shell corner brad, which is only about a year old, lol! the "coral" is a spellbinders fern die; all the images were stamped with staz-on, base coated with a tombow brush marker and had shading added with prismacolor pencils; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, quickie glue pen

thankfully, i've been playing along with kathy racoosin's latest daily marker 30 day coloring challenge. so i had lots of adorable lawn fawn "critters in the sea" all colored up and ready to roll. and yes, i pretty much used ALL of them. because although coloring turns out to be fairly easy in comparison to engineering, it's still somewhat high up on the curve of things that do not come naturally to me. so those babies were gonna get used.

i am therefore extremely pleased that the retro rubber challenge blog having an "anything goes" challenge for which one need only use stamps older than a year, and mention their age. in this case i'm not entirely sure how old said swimmy critters actually are, but i know i that i won them in a blog candy giveaway before we moved to this house in 2013; i remember because at that time i still hadn't inked them and considered i should probably donate them to my favorite charity shop. (but i couldn't bring myself do it because they are just sooooooooooo cuuuuuuuuute!)

something i highly suggest to anyone who has never made a step card* is: find a really good tutorial, preferably with a template; then practice the scoring, cutting and folding on scrap paper. because if you're the kind of person who is not naturally attracted to the engineering of fancy folds, you will royally mess up the first one. and possibly also the second one. once you've got the hang, g'head and make a "real" one. after that, the process gets easier. well, comparatively.

if you want to see step cards by people who really know how to make step cards, you definitely need to hop over to see what the SOS crew have done this week. because they make it look EASY!!! ♥

*let's face it, i'm probably the only lifelong crafty cardmaker to whom this applies, but let's pretend there's one other person, k? and also that ppl read footnotes! :)