Surprise Baby Shower for Anna-Karin

Anna-Karin Evaldsson is a very special member of the Eileen Hull Inspiration Team. Last year there were a lot of changes in her life, including a move from one continent to another and just a few months later, a new baby! Leo arrived weeks ahead of schedule (and just 20 minutes after reaching the hospital!) but thankfully he and Anna-Karin are both doing well. 

We want to show Anna-Karin how special she is to us, so we are giving her a virtual baby shower today to celebrate Leo's birth! Even though we can't be with her, we send our love and a special crafty surprise. We invite you to visit each team member/shower guest's blog to see what they created for this new little guy. 

If you have a message for Anna-Karin, please visit Eileen's blog to leave your well wishes in the comments- then she can read them all at once. Thanks for being part of our celebration!

For my gift, I wanted to use Eileen's dies and so I made baby Leo a money box/piggy bank using Eileen's fabulous Artist Trading Blocks.  These are winging their way to Anna-Karin now, I hope she likes them!

I used some blue stripe paper from my stash to cover some mat board and I die cut the largest block (658983) and also a medium sized block from die 658984.  I find it easier to glue the paper to the mat board first before die cutting, it gives much neater edges (a tip I picked up from Eileen).

The characters are die cut from Eileen's range of Thinlet's dies - Elephant & Giraffe and Lion & Monkey - aren't they just the cutest characters!  The A, B, C letters come from the large ATB die (658983).

I added some grasses which were cut from Tim Holtz's Tapered Fringe die and his Scribbles & Splat die set.  The letters for Leo's name and birth year are from Tim's Newsprint Alpha Parts and I used Distress Paint in Chipped Sapphire to colour them blue.

This view shows the slot in the top (another of Eileen's dies) and I left one side of the box un-glued so that money can be taken out as well as put in!  This view shows how I managed to make the elephant and lion stand on top.  Each one was created using about 16 layers of card to give them lots of depth.

As my other fantastic teamies have also created gifts for baby Leo, if you have the time, it would be wonderful if you could visit them to see their wonderful creations too:

Eileen Hull

Donna Braaten-Budzynski
Pam Bray

Tracy Evans
Diana Hetherington
Shelly Hickox

Lisa Hoel

Oxana Moupasirido
Anne Redfern (that's me!)
Nicole Wright

I am sure those of you who know the talented Anna-Karin and her incredible work will want to send her your congratulatory wishes too and as I said above, you can do so by visiting Eileen Hull and leaving your message there.

I am just in the nick of time to enter the fabulous Darnell's NBUS challenge - the animal dies are new and have never been used before.

Thanks so much for looking, I hope to see you again soon!  Hugs, Anne xx