It’s starting to feel a lot more like fall in North Texas as our mornings are beginning to be more brisk. Fall is one of my favorite seasons, and one of the things I love about fall is that our winter bird friends return. My son got the family into bird watching when he was younger and we have enjoyed it ever since. We have birds that come and go from our area each year, and we enjoy looking for them.
This week, we’re using the Stampin’ Up! Nests of Winter to suite to design our projects. This suite of products includes lovely patterned paper, stamps, and dies that all share bird images. Today, we’re using a very simple layout to create our design.
We get started with a base of Smoky Slate cardstock. Our center background panel is a strip of patterned papers. The woodgrain pattern is from the Nests of Winter pack, while the mat is from Nature’s Sweetness. I love how the mat really accentuates the colors and shading in the woodgrain pattern.
Our focal panel also has several layers. The base is a piece of the Pretty Peacock Season of Elegance foiled paper that is diecut using the Nested Essentials set. I wanted to pull in pops of color that would accentuate the blue undertones in the birds’ feathers.
The sentiment panel is a piece of white cardstock diecut using the Greetings of the Season dies, and then the sentiment from Wonderful Thoughts is stamped in black on the left side to allow for our focal image. Our duo of birds is stamped in black on Smoky Slate and then colored with Stampin’ Blends. I used a combination of Smoky Slate, Pretty Peacock, and Calypso Coral to shade the birds to resemble tufted titmice—some of my favorite little winter birds. I fussy cut the birds to omit the seasonal greenery to keep things more seasonally neutral for this card design.
The focal panel is adhered with dimensionals over a twist of the Pretty Peacock & Gold metallic ribbon. Groups of Pretty Peacock sequins are added on either side of our focal panel for a pop of sparkle and to help move the eye across our design.
Tomorrow we’re going to be using more of the images from the papers in this suite. I hope you’ll pop by.
Products used in today’s card:
Smoky Slate, Basic White cardstock
Nests of Winter, Season of Elegance, Nature’s Sweetness DSP
Winterly Tree Tops, Wonderful Thoughts stamps
Nested Essentials, Greetings of the Season dies
Stampin’ Blends
Pretty Peacock & Gold metallic ribbon
Sequins trio
Dimensionals
Adhesives
Song Sparrow Papercrafts 