CottageCutz: Welcome Circus Train

Happy Friday! It's Jeanne today with a fun slimline baby card. The Circus Train and Circus Train Animals are a marvelous way to welcome a little one. This train would also make a wonderful invitation to a child's birthday party. And the 8 1/2 x 3 1/2 format of a slimline card is the perfect format for the train!

I wanted this card to be bright, yet somewhat soft in color since it's a baby card.

I looked through my paper and found some perfect patterns in the tones I had in mind. I keep two reference notebooks of paper samples and this helps enormously in picking out patters and colors. I have two posts on my blog (here and here) about how I organize them.

I cut the pieces for the train and animals from various colors of the cardstock. I made sure to choose the seal and elephant for my animals since the paper has gray in it.

This is a card where everything needs to be aligned. I have some tips on how I did this.

To get the wheels straight when assembling the engine and train cars I made sure to align the top of the horizontal spoke with the bottom of the car and the vertical spoke with the inside edge of the cage. This works for all wheels but the small one in front. That will be added once the engine is on the card.

I also glued the animals to the cage before putting them on the card so I could better align their faces with the bars. They are very slightly off center but I wanted the eyes to show!

Next I cut my panels and adhered them together.

I aligned all the train pieces on the card and placed a light pencil mark over the center of the curlicue on each piece so I would know exactly where to glue them. Then I glued down the engine, the connecting piece and the bottom of the middle train car.

I had not yet adhered the ball to the seal's nose as I wanted it to be "balancing". It needed to be just touching the nose not glued to it. Once the train car was in place I used tweezers to insert and glue down the ball. Then I adhered the top and the rest of the train.