More Snowday Fun

Well, after being snowed in again yesterday, I made good use of my day home by playing in the craft room on some new product designs. Once again, Whitney and I had to resort to Skype to talk through some ideas since the road conditions didn't permit her to come across town & enjoy the snowday with me.

We started with two challenges in order to solidify the layout and color scheme for this card. The Sweet Stop Blog had an excellent sketch up this week that lent itself very well to a birthday card. With the layout chosen, it wasn't difficult to select the perfect color scheme from Papertrey Ink's Anniversary Color Challenge. I am a HUGE fan of Dawn McVey and always look forward to her posts. She's such an amazingly talented stamper AND designer. And one of my favorite things about Dawn is her fantastic eye for color!! So it was no surprise when my eye gravitated to her color palette.

After choosing Dawn's fun color scheme for my birthday card, I went through my stamps in search of the perfect image. And that's when I came across this chickie. I'm a huge animal lover, which is one reason why I love Whipper Snapper stamps. And I'm most especially fond of sets designed by Anna Wight. Talk about another crazy-talented stamper!! This is her Gift Chicken stamp and the sentiment is from her Crazy for Chickens set.

For a change of pace, I paper pieced the chicken image rather than watercoloring as I usually do. This took a bit more time since I'm cutting out little pieces of the image, but it made it much easier to get the colors for the challenge just right. I did watercolor chickie's beak and combs b/c I thought that would look more natural than paper pieces. To make the hay nest a bit more lifelike, I glued some DNC floss under the lil' gal w/ my two-way glue pen and then, once the glue was dry, spread and "fluffed" it a bit for even more realism. I used a Sizzix die to cut the sentiment panel and then dressed it up w/ some pearls & gems. To give the entire card a bit more *oomph*, I popped up the image and sentiment panels.

I hope you've enjoyed your stop in today - we certainly appreciate all of you who are kind enough to comment on our creations! It's still freezing cold here today, but at least we can get & around and go places. Right now, I'm off to warm my hands by the fire!