Helpful birds

Hello! I've been away waaay too long. We were on holidays in August - went to Manitoulin Island for a couple of weeks, and then off to Newfoundland for a week too. Our tour of the islands - sounds like it involved a lot of sand and umbrella drinks. Not so much. Still, it was lovely and I even got some hammock time on the Manitoulin. If you are ever there, you must, must, must go to Mum's Bakery and try an apple fritter. Those things should be illegal. In fact they probably are.

Since I've been back I've been madly stamping to develop class samples, stamp club projects, Christmas card class projects, birthday cards, etc. You'd think that would amount to copious amounts of blog fodder. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. (insert evilly laughing emoticon here)

My scanner was out of sorts, and my cord to withdraw pictures from my camera is missing, so I was unable to get my lovely creations from the real world into the virtual world. DH has fixed the printer/scanner so now I was able to scan in a recent effort, if not somewhat crookedly. I figured I would go for crooked+posted over straight+not posted.

I love this image from Stamping Bella, drawn by one of my favourite artists Krista Schneider. I love these helpful little birds. If I were drawing them though, I would have them putting away laundry and combing cookbooks for family-friendly recipes. Still, a bit of early decorating is a more helpful activity than sewing ball gowns. I embossed the image with charcoal embossing powder (zing) and coloured it in with markers (Tombows), forgetting entirely that there is usually snow on the ground at Christmas time. These will be the early birds (snort, get it??), decorating in November. You can tell it's November by the muddy ground and the 3 snowflakes that are there intentionally, and not stray flecks of clear embossing powder that escaped detection until the image was half coloured and it was too late (at night) to bail out and start again.

I fussed and fiddled with the embellies, trying desperately to use wide grosgrain ribbon like all the cool girls. Nope, didn't work. I did use a button, though, and a linen thread (SU) bow. So that kinda makes me cool, or at least a wannabe. And I used Primas, so that makes me trendy in a late adopter sort of way. But all in all, I like this card, and that makes me happy!

Thanks for stopping by!

Other supplies: patterned paper - Wassail line by BasicGrey, cardstock by Stampin Up (true thyme, chocolate chip, cranberry crisp), watercolour paper, brads (unknown), linen