Birds of a feather

Hello, crafting friends!

 

Where has the week flown off to? Very little crafting has taken place and my fingers have been feeling quite naked without their usual coating of ink! That was remedied today as I scrolled through Challenges for Days and was instantly inspired.

 

To start this card, I watercoloured a pale green square directly onto a thick cardbase (I've found that as long as I don't use too much water the card doesn't buckle.) I topped this with a circle of vellum, diecut with a Waffleflower nesting die, then added some stamped and fussy cut flowers from The Greetery's Fleur Expressions. The birds are from Robin and Wren, also from The Greetery, and also stamped and fussy cut. 

 

I had fussy cut the birds without a white outline but decided they needed one so, instead of starting again, I glue-dotted the birds to a snippet of white card and fussy cut around them. I quite like the dimensional look it gives them. I positioned them so they look as if they're having a nice chat so decided a Hello sentiment from an Altenew set would be appropriate :)

CHALLENGES

Narelle's beautiful sketch at Freshly Made Sketches was my starting point for this card, along with The Card Concept's gorgeous inspiration photo and colour palette - I have made a Clean and Layered card. I'm also playing along at Allsorts where the optional theme this week is Fur or Feathers, as well as The Snippets Playground where Miss requires us to make a project using snippets. I forgot to take a photo of my snippets but the vellum was a small offcut and I stamped and fussy cut the birds and flowers from white snippets as well as the sentiment.

 

AND IN OTHER NEWS

I love watching the busy little garden birds, fluttering about gathering nesting materials and preparing for their families but, meanwhile, the pigeons are like drunken nightclubbers behaving disgracefully and disturbing the peace!

 

Here's a portly chap cooing sweet nothings into the ear of a flighty miss. Hmmm! Be off with you or I'll release the Beige Beasts!

Sending hugs,

Autumnal leafy arches

Hello, crafting friends!

 

Isn't it wonderful when a craft item arrives in your craft room and the ideas for using it come flooding at you? All I need is a bit of extra time to get them onto paper! The item in this case is a layering stencil from The Greetery called Mistletoe Arches. It's designed to  be used for Christmas cards but...

 

... I saw no reason that it shouldn't turn up on an autumn birthday card! I started this card by masking off the edges of a card base with low tack tape, stamping a background with a woodgrain background stamp and sponging yellow ink over the whole thing before removing the tape.

 

The next step was stenciling the arch over the background in layers using autumn coloured inks and adding detail with markers. The sentiment was made with two stamp sets from Uniko.

 

I added a little bird from The Greetery's Robin and Wren stamp set, stamped and fussy cut and attached to  the card front.

CHALLENGES

I'm joining in with Brenda's Colours of Autumn challenge at Allsorts; also Four Seasons challenge where the theme is Anything Goes Fall; I'm delighted that Darlene and Diane have also started their new Stencil Fun Challenge and am linking up there too; I'm playing along at Happy Little Stampers Birthday Challenge too where Anything Goes; This is the first outing for the Mistletoe Arches stencils so I'm playing at Darnell's NBUS challenge where we show off our Never Before Used Schtuff.

 

Also, a heads up: Allsorts are celebrating their 700th challenge this Saturday 29th October and there are prizes aplenty to be won! See you there :)

AND IN OTHER NEWS

On Saturday, OH decided it was time to curb the enthusiasm of some ivy in our back garden and Eva was delighted when she saw him getting out ladders and tarpaulin. She sees her role as general helper in the garden and this is exactly the kind of job she feels is her forté.

 

Here she is shredding some bits of woody stem - but wait, it appears to be raining leaves and Eva is quickly becoming the Incredible Disappearing Dog!

 

Sending hugs,

The one layer Birthday bird

Hello, crafting friends!

 

Welcome to another Saturday burst of inspiration courtesy of Addicted to CAS! The code word today was chosen by the oh-so-talented Marie, who has delighted us all by returning to her roots as an Addicted to CAS designer!

 

I was so pleased to see this code word as I can't resist a bird stamp and it gave me a chance to use one from a set that I hadn't inked up before :)

 

This gorgeous little layered wren comes from Robin and Wren by The Greetery, and I teamed him up with a leaf from Uniko's Nature's Treasure stencil. It's a very simple one layer card - I smooshed a little pale blue ink on a card front, sponged the stencil with two shades of green and added detail with a brown pencil, stamped the layers of bird and finished with the sentiment.

 

Okay so now it's your turn! Do fly over to the Addicted to CAS challenge site to check out the wonderful inspiration from the team and then you can use the Linky Tool at the bottom of the post to share your own creation. Don't forget to keep your card nice and clean and simple with plenty of white space... we can't wait to see what you make!

CHALLENGES

I'm linking up at Happy Little Stampers Birthday challenge where Anything Goes and with the Anything Goes option at Seize Your Birthday; I'm also joining in at Cardz 4 Guyz where Melanie's theme is Use A Stencil.

 

AND IN OTHER NEWS

I was out on a walk the other day when I spotted a very rare bird. Here she is...

 

... the Golden Retriever bird in full flight!!

Sending hugs,