Welcome Friends! Whew, this week has just flown by! I spent some of it not feeling well, and the remaining time trying to keep up with all the life still going on around me! I LOVED your creations last week, you all rocked the color combination! Though I think you are going to have TONS of fun with this week’s challenge from Joanne:

Doesn’t that sound FUN!!! And the challenge graphic is so ca-yoot, how could you not want to join in on the fun?

As soon as I read the challenge, I had a stamp set in mind. It’s another stamp and die set that were a MUST HAVE and then sat and collected dust while I stared at them, wondering what on earth I would DO with them! Have you had moments like that? Honestly, it’s ridiculous. I must stop!

Can you see why this set came to my mind when I read the challenge to feature a bird? Isn’t this set adorable? I’m SO glad I broke it out! I found a wonderful booth at the Scrapbook Expo in 2013 (cough) called The Stamps of Life. It’s a smaller stamp line designed by Stephanie Bernard, who is also a designer for Sizzix and was a major contributor in the development of the Big Shot Magnetic Platform. Anyway, it turns out she’s local to me (Southern California) and periodically does classes and sells from her warehouse location. I purchased a ton of her product at the Scrapbook Expo and then attended one of her classes as well. This stamp and die set is called Birds & Tree. 

I’ve never created a ‘scene’ before but thought this set called for one so I pulled out my Stitched Mats: Rounded Rectangles from Lil ‘Inker and created a sky panel using Soft Sky card stock. I then aligned my tree die onto it and ran it through the Big Shot again. Next I used the stitched mats again on a scrap of Pear Pizzazz cardstock and then ran THAT through the Big Shot again using the Border Builders Die from Lil ‘Inker to create the wavy hill for my grass.

I then die cut my tree from Baked Brown Sugar card stock and inked it up in the same color with the matching stamp, using my MISTI to align everything perfectly. I attached a scrap piece of white card stock to the back of my Soft Sky panel and then inset my tree die cut. I LOVE the look!

Next, I die cut lots of leaves in two different sizes, as well as flowers and my adorable little bird. I used Pear Pizzazz for the leaves, Pink Pirouette for the flowers, and Hello Honey for the bird. After that, I inked up all my pieces with their coordinating stamps. Yes, this took a bit of time but was so fun and definitely worth it!

I used a sentiment from the same set but opted for a simple small oval punch from Stampin’ Up! to frame it, rather than using the speech bubble die included in the set. To make my life easier, I laid out all of my punched pieces and snapped a picture of it on my phone and then used the photo as a guide to glue everything down. The flowers are popped up on Stampin’ Dimensionals, as is the grass panel as well as my birdie and his wing. The pearls were an afterthought but they turned out to be one of my favorite elements!

I hope you have enjoyed today’s project, created in one of my ‘better’ periods this week:) I am planning to post a follow up to my Blog Hop project tomorrow, including more photos of the individual cards as well as photos and dimensions for the card gift box. I hope to see you then!

Thank you so much for popping in today, won’t you take a moment to pop over and see the darling projects created by the rest of the design team? I ‘peeked’ at them while posting my project to the blog and I can tell you for sure that there are some beautiful inspiration to be seen!