Pet Bereavement - Personalised gift frame

October 06, 2020

Hey Crafty Friends,

Bereavement of any kind is hard to go through, I'm sure we all struggle with bereavement cards or projects. Today I wanted to share something a little different to a card, a personalised frame. I am making a personalised pet bereavement frame however this would work for any type of project you want to do. As always product links can be found at the end of my post 😊 (click any image to view it larger)

As part of the coffee bean design team this month we were provided an image by our illustrator Becky Conley of an arch with leave twines, having previously picked up a frame in a pound store I immediately came up with this gift idea.

Starting with my image printed on alcohol marker friendly cardstock and coloured it up using Spectrum Noir Tri-Blends. Based on where my idea is going I also drew some step inside the archway. For the backing panel I distress inked squeezed lemonade onto PaintON cardstock.

Colour combination:

Archway - Green Turquoise blend

Leaves - Orange, Dark Red, Gold Yellow + Light Green blends.

We all have a pot of printed images I'm sure that are just waiting to be put onto cards and sometimes there is just something in there that will work perfectly, I pulled out a dog from the Heffy Doodle who let the dogs out stamp set that I had previously coloured to use alongside the archway.

All the above will create just 1 part of a 4 way split frame so now it was time to put together the next part of the frame, this will form the section above the archway. Using the Heffy Doodle starry rainbow die and cut it from various coloured card stock, what I love about this die is that the stars are fully cut and you can pop them out, I popped them out and switched the colours around. Whilst using the Heffy Doodle stash I cut out some swirly clouds and stenciled a cloudy skies background with distress inks peacock feathers, picked raspberry and squeezed lemonade.

Now there are 2 sections left to fill, I'm actually only going to complete one last frame on my project as I purposely want to leave the last one blank, I'll explain later!

As with any card or gift a sentiment is needed, this is probably the hardest thing for a pet bereavement or any bereavement, there are lots of inspiration online, I found a nice little quote that I felt was really lovely, using a variety of alphabet stamp sets I stamped up the quote in various Memento ink pad colours on a distress inked background of candied apple, carved pumpkin and cracked pistachio.

The final frame I am purposely leaving empty so that the person this is gifted too can insert their own photo memory of their beloved pet and have something to cherish.