Save the bees!

Hello crafting friends!

I've been trying to make a Christmas card for Rudolph Day but it's not going well. On the other hand, while wandering around Blogland, I spotted Milka's blog hop raising awareness for this year's World Bee Day and was immediately inspired!

Bees and other pollenators are so important for food production, and numbers have been declining because of loss of habitat, toxic pesticides, climate change and disease. So how can we help? Well, it isn't hard to create a friendly environment for them - check out these ideas. If you don't have a garden, you can still attract bees to balconies, window boxes, terraces etc. There are many other things you can do too - support local bee keepers for example, and don't use pesticides on your plants!

Here's my card celebrating bees:

To make my background, I sponged distress ink through the Honeycomb stencil by Funky Fossil. The cow parsley, from Funky Fossil's In the Meadow stamp set, was stamped over the top in green ink and the flowers coloured with a white gel pen. This doesn't completely cover the green but does give some nice definition. I trimmed the panel with a Heffy Doodles stitched rectangle die.

I don't have any bee stamps! I do have a set on order but it didn't arrive in time, so I had to draw a bee using a fineliner. I tried to make him look nice and fluffy and coloured his body with a yellow marker and his wings with a Wink of Stella pen before fussy cutting him.

For the greeting, I used black ink to stamp a sentiment from Clearly Besotted's Simply Said onto a scrap of card stock and heat embossed with clear embossing powder. I die cut the left edge of it with the stitched rectangle die, snipped the other end into a ribbon tail and glued it onto the card panel. Finally, the bee was popped up on dimensionals and the panel attached to a card base.

Thank you very much you bees - you are appreciated!

CHALLENGES
I'm joining in with Milka's wonderful To Bee or Not to Bee blog hop; I used LeAnne's sketch from the Paper Players (taking the liberty of flipping the sentiment over to the other side); I'm also playing along with Time Out where the theme is Free (I want bees to live their lives free from the threat of extinction); and I WAS going to link up with Tic Tac Toe but I'm out of time :/

AND IN OTHER NEWS
I'm a big fan of honey. I use it as a topping for natural yoghurt with chopped nuts; also to make a chocolate sauce perfect for a banana split or to top ice cream - 1oz melted butter, 1 tblsp cocoa, 1 tblsp honey, dash vanilla extract whisked together. Oh yum! And then there's honey pie...

... here is an ACTUAL picture of an adorable honey pie!

Looks like the lockdown in the UK is really beginning to lift now. What do you think?

Sending hugs,