Cards for Men challenge 5- Water...

I can't believe we're up to challenge 5 this year- where's the time going?! This time we have a 'Water' theme at Cards for Men and the challenge runs until 13th March so why not pop over and join in?

I was inspired by the image from Hope Jacare to go all curvacious with my card! Claire's images always strike me as 'curly, swirly' and are a joy for those of us who love colouring in. I had this wonderful digi paper set in a download from Mommy Me Time Scrapper called To The Sea and added the sentiment to the tag in Photoshop.
This card gave me a chance to have a first play with my new card cutting die from Go Kreate, available exclusively from Click on Crafts. It is designed to cut through a folded card to give you a shaped card but I had a little trouble at first- I think I cut my bases from quite sturdy card (which in the end the die had no problem cutting) but my Big Shot felt tight with all tabs and too loose with tab 2 off so I used an old slim calendar to act as a shim. It was perfect because I could adjust how many pages to put through until it felt just right. I used it on top of tab 1 on the multipurpose platform and under the cutting plate sandwich. As this is an easel card the brown front was one layer so this went through fine with all tabs then just needed a little hand trimming where the fold would be. I drew around the inside of the card die to shape my papers perfectly then cut them out by hand. The shape matched nicely with nesties Labels 8 which I used for the image.
The swirl is cut from an oddment of glitter card that I rescued from a card my son got ages ago. It matched so well- now I have justification for all the bits I keep! The easel is supported on card candy. I kept the embelishment simple because of all the curvy shapes- the only straight line on this card is the fold at the back of the easel!

We are sponsored by Claire from Hope Jacare and she is offering 3 digi images to our lucky winner. The rest of the DT have made fabulous cards with her images too, so do pop over to Cards for Men to see their work and for the rest of the challenge details.

I would also like to enter this card in the following challenges:

• Shannon's Sentiments- fussy cutting
• Card Creations and More- sparkle
• Stamp, Scrap and Doodle- easel card
• The Stampman- curls and swirls
• Stampin' for the Weekend- monochrome
• Do you stack up? - anything goes