A Bird in the Hand

Daring Cardmakers Day today and it's Vanessa who's set this tweet little dare.

 ".... I really love this time of year because the nights are rapidly getting shorter and the days longer. Spring is in the air, the birds are chirping and tweeting early in the mornings and I'm starting to think about mowing that lawn again!

Your challenge this week is :

Tweetie Pie

Please use a bird or birds on your card and thats it, any kind you like.

As always, we'd love to see what you make, so please leave a link on the DCM BLOG so we can admire your creations."

 It's seems like ages since I've had a chance to play with the fab Funky Hand "Dreams Come True" CD, so knowing there was a really cute little birdie digi stamp on there I thought I'd take the chance to put that right.

I was tempted for a minute to use the cute owl that's also one of the "stamps", but then my eye caught the watering can design....and the two sets of lollipop flowers and together with the long-legged birdie a plan was hatched ("oh no, not another pun", I hear you sigh).

The papers are printed using Funky Hand's "Dreams Come True" CD.  A spotty one for the birdie and a gorgeous striped design for the watering can and the awning - a Martha Stewart border punch was used for the scalloped edge.

I converted the birdie and watering can from the original digi images to templates for Robo cutting and gave each some dimension by cutting in layers of card as well as paper.  For the upper layer of the bird I made the template so it would cut around the wing , so that that the wing could then fold upwards a little.

For  Ms Birdie's legs I've used very narrow B&W braid

I used both sets of lollipop flowers, resized, "glued" together and repeated before printing them out.  I like the way the flowers are decorative enough not to need colouring in - especially as my skills in that department are laughable! I did feel they needed a bit of colour to tie the whole thing together so I added a few tiny buttons to their centres.  I've used embroidery floss to make tiny bows for some of the flowers, and also knotted some through the button holes

The sentiment was an afterthought - I was going to leave it without a message but the gap at the bottom of the card just looked a bit wrong, so I've used rub-on letters (Maya Road) to add a little "any-time" greeting.

We saw some fabulous cards last week for the Daffodils challenge and I'm absolutely sure that this week will be fab too.  If you've not checked out the DCM BLOG yet, please do go and see all the chirpy little numbers the team have made this week - they are all wonderful!

Now I'm off to stick inserts in and bag up some cards to send off - not my favourite bit of card-making, but once that's done I can do some more interesting stuff.

Catch you later