9 snakes and a hippo

I'm making cards for Operation Write Home, and playing with my new Cameo Silhouette, too.  I had some issues cutting the Xpress-it cardstock and ended up slicing 2 snakes completely into bits and pieces. Poor snakes. Anyway, I decided to sneak a pink hippo into the group. She can't say "misss you" because hippos don't hiss when they talk. I'm just saying.

So I've learned a thing or 2 this weekend. If you emboss the front of the card, the inside front must be lined if you expect it to be writable. If you line the inside front of a kraft colored card with white, the other side needs to be lined too, or it looks bad. I ended up making kraft panels and applying them to the fronts of cream colored card bases, which kind of negates the whole "clean and simple" concept.  If these cards were for personal use I'd leave the fronts embossed and unlined. But these are for troops to write home on, so they need the extra space.

Oh, and the hand-trimmed snakes with a small white border look better on the kraft background, so I'd better get cracking on learning how to do a whole page of them on the Cameo. I'm trying to decide what critter comes next.

The snakes and hippo are from The Alley Way Stamps set called Tropic Topic, the misss you thought bubble was cobbled together with Lawn Fawn's A Birdie Told Me and Harold's ABCs. The hippo's quote bubble is Lawn Fawn's Chit Chat.