Sweet Little Robin

Morning All,

... from a damp and dull part of Scotland everyone. It's quite pleasant though - I'm not adapted to extremes of temperature.

The card I'm sharing with you today features one of my favourite garden birds, the cheeky wee robin. I couldn't wait to ink up the stamp,  from a very new stamp designer and producer, Caroline at 3 Cavaliers, as soon as the postie popped it through the letterbox yesterday.

Instead of a list of materials used, I thought I'd give you a 'how I made this' run down, just for a change.

 - I raided my stash to make this card beginning with a 6" square die-cut edged card for the base. 

 - A square of smooth brown card, from the snippet box, was cut to fit the front. 

 - The next layer is cut from Roses in Harmony paper, Hot of The Press (HOTP), which came free with Scrapbook magazine - slightly smaller, by about 1/4", all round so that it is framed by the brown card.

 - From the strip of brown card that was leftover after cutting the base layer, a 1" belly band was cut and edge-punched using Martha Stewart's arches punch. A decorative strip was cut from one of the sheets of Roses in Harmony paper and attached to the band leaving the edge showing. Finally, a length of the green Offray ribbon was stretched over the band which was then attached to the base layers.

 - From another sheet of the HOTP paper, came the label for the topper and the tiny tag and a butterfly.

 - The robin was stamped, with Versafine Vintage Sepia ink, firstly on a snippet of kraft cardstock and then on to the label in such a way that the robin's head extends over the top of the label. Then the robin on kraft was fussy cut before adhering to the label, as in decoupage. 

 - After that it was just a matter of adding all the little embellishments. The pink butterflies were punched out of yet another snippet of card and then given the stickle treatment - love that stuff for adding a tiny bit of bling. With great difficulty, I managed to make a double bow from the Offray ribbon (bought for a song at a car boot sale) and attached it with the tiny tag to the left of the topper. The final finishing touch is the My Mind's Eye Winter Wonderland enamel dots - my latest embellishment must-have, but so difficult to find in the UK ... these were purchases from Amazon!

I think I'll be popping over to the Pixie's Crafty Snippets Playground to participate in Miss Di's weekly challenge, i.e. to use up our snippets in whatever we create. Happily, I managed to incorporate a few in this card.

I hope you like the little robin as much as I do and that you will pop over to Caroline's blog. This is her first steps into the crafty world of stamp production so I'm sure she will appreciate all the encouragement you can give her. She also makes lovely cards.

Right, I'm off to have some soup for lunch. Mouth still sore but rapidly improving, thanks to all the helpful advice received from all you knowledgeable peeps. I'm now armed with Anbesol, Janet, and Papaya juice, Julia - though I draw the line at salt washes, Angie :) The Papaya juice was difficult to find but it's so soothing and very effective ... oh, and it's tasty too. All-in-all, I'm now feeling perkier - and one beneficial side-affect is that I've lost 2lbs in weight :))

Take care everyone and happy crafting,