Valley Oak Paper - Handmade greeting cards & gifts

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Whale in a Bottle

This die set was Spellbinder’s Large Die of the Month for June 2023. Sign up for July is now open. The July Large Die of the Month is a cute Yule stocking with a gingerbread person and a gnome.

The bottle die is 5.5” tall. That means that you can use it to create a shaped A2 card. Unfortunately that also means that it’s a little too big to fit comfortably on an A2 card, particularly if you want to use the cork. That’s why I chose to make this a 5 by 7 card instead. For the background I used a turquoise marble paper from a Colorbook pad.

Cut list

Bottle

I started by adhering the three parts of the bottle to the bottle base. Then I splattered it with white and blue ink to simulate bubbles. I added the cork and the lip.

Whale

Next I built the whale. It consists of a base layer and three separate die cuts for the tail, the far fin and the back. I put a thin layer of foam under the whale, to raise it a bit from the background. But I didn’t glue it down yet.

Seascape

I inked the rocks with dark blue around the base and started building the landscape at the bottom of the bottle. I placed some of the plants behind the rocks and some in front of them. Given that the whale is looking toward the right, it made sense to build up the seaweed vertically on the left side and keep it shorter on the right side. I only adhered the rocks at their bases, so I could tuck things in under them later.

Having watched the instructional video on the Spellbinder’s YouTube channel, I knew that the waves aren’t meant to fit together neatly like a puzzle. My goal was to have the tail stick up above the waves, and the silver glitter waves to be popped up over the tail. I also wanted the waves to conceal the seam between the different parts of the bottle. So I moved the whale and the various wave bits around until I was happy. In the end I glued the whale in place so that the far fin was behind the center rock and the tail was above the water, as I wanted.

Next time I think I’ll try to move the whale and the waves a little bit higher up, so there’s less empty space at the top of the bottle.

Sentiment

I finished up by cutting and glueing the sentiment die cuts so that the surface would be level when I applied it to the card, partly over the bottle.

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