Four feathers and an Open heart

Have you ever wanted to make a card along a certain design and kept coming up blank?  I certainly did with the sketch challenge over at The Paper Players.  I knew I wanted to enter the challenge and must have begun a card at least a half dozen times only to change my mind as I began putting it together.  It just wasn't working out the way I wanted.

Sometimes I dream about a card and then make it.  That's what happened to me with this card.  I woke up knowing what I was going to do and all it really took was stamping, cutting and putting the card together.  It's like I was simply following a plan and hardly had to think.  After all those beginnings that took me no-where, it sure was wonderful having the card come together so well.

I decided to use the Four Feathers stamp set and coordinating framelits.  That made up my circle.  Then I stamped, coloured and fussy-cut the bird from the An Open Heart stamp set.  Yes, I'm always fussy-cutting, aren't I?  It seems to be something I can't get away from.

I used Crumb Cake as my base cardstock, followed by layers of Tangelo Twist, Naturals White and, finally, a piece of the beautiful Colour Me Autumn Designer Series Paper.  I used my 2 1/4" circle framelit to cut out the centre of the Designer Paper and then glued in the same size in Naturals White cardstock which I had first embossed using my Woodgrain embossing folder.  I liked the textured look of it behind my bird.

Around the circle I used Dimensionals to attach the six feathers that I had stamped and cut out.  Then I used my Autumn Accents Bigz die to cut an acorn from a piece of Crumb Cake cardstock.  I used a sponge to add some Baked Brown Sugar colour to the top of it and then glued the acorn to a piece of Whisper White.  Then I cut very close to the acorn shape, leaving a very thin border of white.  Finally, I used Memento black ink to stamp the acorn with "Oh Happy Day" from the Hello Love hostess stamp set.

To finish up I cut a narrow piece of Burlap ribbon and carefully took out the stitching.  Then I cut one end into a banner shape and glued that just under the feather circle.  I attached the acorn at the right end using Dimensionals.  I also mounted the bird on Dimensionals and added some Tombo glue to both the beak and feet so that when I attached the bird, the feet and beak were also attached.

For more cards using this sketch, check out The Paper Players.