Spring Cards for Friends and Family

Vicki here again today with a spring card for friends or family members.  Most of my family lives in the midwest and so during this time of year, waiting for spring to arrive, they often feel like Spring will never come.  I like to send a spring card to remind them that the wait won't be much longer.

For today's card, I used the Perched Bird Die with some of the new Cottage Meadow Paper Pad.  I like these bright cheery colors that make me think of Spring, but I seem to especially like the corner designs.  They are double-sided papers, so the reverse design is the full sheet rather than a corner.  That's night in case you want to have a fuller pattern.  I think I have mentioned before that these papers remind me of some of the Annie Rifle designs for Rifle Paper Company.  I love her art, so I really like these papers.

For the die cuts, I cut four white dies and glued 3 of them, one on top of the other, for that stacked look.  For the 4th die, I used some sponge dauber to add color selectively and snipping off the branch, added just that part to the stacked dies.

On the white cardbase, I die cut the largest Matinee Rectangle Layers from Light Blue Cardstock (Gina K Designs Sea Glass) and then the second to the largest Matinee Rectangle from the Cottage Meadows Patterned Paper corner design.  If you tack the die all the way in the corner with a little bit of Delicate Surface Tape, it's very easy to get the placement in the right spot.

In the first two photos especially, you can see that I put some shimmer pen on just the bird.  I had to do another angle for you here so that you can see the shimmer on the bird.

Eastern Bluebird

Blue Jay

The Eastern Bluebird is the Official State Bird of Missouri, where I was born, and I love the pretty little bright-blue birds with their rosy tummies.  I didn't actually look for any images until after I completed this card and realized I should have used a more russet color, but you get the idea.  There are three species of Bluebirds here in the US, but the Eastern & Western Bluebirds have the rosy tummy area.  The Mountain Bluebird is pretty much all blue.  It's super easy to google for images if you are trying for coloring of a certain species, I was just going by memory to do mine.   The Bluebird is not to be confused with the Blue Jay, which are also beautiful birds, but they are also quite aggressive.  I remember as a little girl,  a baby blue jay falling out of the nest in my Great Grandmother's front yard in Missouri.  My Nana leaned over to pick up and put the baby bird back in the nest, and the Mama Jay attacked her, pecking at her head.  Think "Mama Bear Mode".  Needless to say, Nana never touched a baby bird again.  At that time we didn't have Wikipedia to tell us what the behavior of the different birds is, so she didn't know.  She was just trying to be helpful.  Clearly, this was an incident not forgotten by either of us. Wiki says that Blue Jays are very noisy and aggressive birds so I'd agree. I hope you enjoy my sweet little Bluebird card today! 

Supplies

94438 Matinee Rectangle Layers craft die

94244 Perched Bird craft die

PP1003 Cottage Meadow 6x6 pack