I’m back again, this time with day 9 of my ’12 Dies of Clarity’ challenge, using ‘a bird in the hand’ aperture die that was September’s New Design Club from Claritystamp. This is yet another one that I haven’t used until now, and I was again grateful for the project sheet which had some design ideas from Paul Church and Dee Paramour that got me started.

My first step was to cut the die into a piece of kraft cardstock that I’d sized to sit on a 5×7 card blank. I’d struggled to see the bird clearly when I first looked at the die image, so I cut it out again in a dark brown card and trimmed out the bird’s outline, which I glued onto the kraft card image.

I attached the kraft card to a larger piece of ‘Antarctica’ designer paper – I wanted a blue to fill in the sky. The next task was to start paper piecing. I cut the die again into an scrap piece of woodgrain paper, and picked out the infill of the bird. This gave the appearance of texture to his feathers. Finally, I cut the die again into the Antarctica paper, using a darker section, and then picked out the leaves to glue into position. I probably won’t be rushing to do this again with the leaves – it took a little while!

Finally I stamped one of the ‘Art Nouveau’ sentiments in Archival ‘potting soil’ onto a strip of kraft card and mounted that onto the designer paper before attaching it to the card front.

The whole piece then went onto the 5×7 card blank. This is a good design for a masculine card, which are not always easy to do.