A couple of birds

Hello crafting pals!

An email pings into my inbox with a challenge reminder; I look at the stamps already out on my table and a pair of ideas appear in my head... That's how today's cards came into being! Come and see:

Yes, it's a twofer! The Twofer Challenge reminder popped up just after I had used the leaves for this card and, since the leaves usually sport a bird, I thought it would be perfect for this month's Critters challenge. Let's have a closer look:

For the background, I whisked some diluted Pool Party ink over a card panel with a sponge, adding some Craft white ink when it was dry, which gives this sort of glow. Once that was dry, I used markers to ink up just the leaves of my stamps with nice autumnal colours - I do love this time of year! The stamps are from a long-retired Stampin' Up set, called Touch of Nature, that I still love to bits :)

I inked up the bird separately with a light, neutral Sahara Sand marker, coloured him with Stampin' Up Blendabilities and cut him out. I'm not sure what sort of bird he's meant to be, but I coloured him as a blue tit - such friendly little birds! The gorgeous sentiment is from one of my current favourite stamp sets - Beautiful Branches by Concorde and 9th.

My second card is a Christmas card - I never waste an opportunity to get those festive cards made!

For this one, I rootled about for some designer paper and came up with this beauty! It's from a pack of retired Stampin' Up papers called All is Calm, and those snowflakes are silver foiled onto the paper. I sponged it with Pool Party ink, stamped some trees on it (Spruce Trees by Inkylicious), then polished it up with a tissue to make a lovely shiny background.

The background was matted onto Tangelo Twist card stock so my Robin didn't have to make everything merry and bright all by himself! I stamped a good-to-honest sentiment from Clearly Besotted's Cityscape and popped it up on dimensionals.

Robins have sharper, pointier beaks than blue tits, so I adjusted that with a fineliner, gave my bird a longer tail and coloured him as a robin, using Spectrum Noir markers this time. I perched him in a snow drift made by punching out white circles and trimming them to fit the background. It amused me to have him looking up at the sentiment as if to say "Who put that sign there?!"

This is my second go at The Twofer Card Challenge this month - I find it a lot of fun to make different cards, for different occasions, using the same stamp, stencil or die!

AND IN OTHER NEWS
My youngest son has been asked to clear out his room before going off to uni. It is a slow process! I recently bought a new vacuum cleaner, a Henry, which I'm delighted with. Henry looks like this:

The state of my son's room will probably be clearer when I explain that today is the first time he has met Henry! He suggested that Henry can be a son substitute when he goes. "Let's face it," he said. "He'll be better at cleaning up than I ever was!" Henry IS very cute. But not as cute as my son!

Thanks for visiting me today - always lovely to have you here :)

See you soon,