Welcome to my crafty blog. There seem to be a lot of hummingbirds around on cards at the moment, so I thought I’d join the party with this card I made for my sister’s birthday earlier this week. (Happy Birthday, Cath!) I’ve used the Stampin’ Up! ‘a touch of ink’ set, which was in this year’s Sale-a-bration, and took inspiration from the sketch over at The Paper Players current challenge.

I started by die cutting a circle of white card, and stamped the hummingbird onto it in black Archival. I then lined the circle up on a 5×7 card blank, and held it in place with a piece of low tack tape, so I could stamp the flowers on the edge of the card to overlap onto the circle. I used my stamping platform for this, which meant I could stamp across the circle of card first, and then lift it off to stamp the rest of the image onto the card front, so that I didn’t get a gap.

I then carried on stamping the flowers around the edge of the card, to pick up the frame effect from the sketch.

Next step was to use the infill stamps from the set to add the colour to the bird and flowers. I blended Distress Oxide in ‘mermaid lagoon’ & ‘bundled sage’ for the hummingbird (just adding the colours straight onto the stamp with a little sponge), and used ‘tattered rose’ with ‘dried marigold’ for the flowers. The great thing about this stamp design is that it’s very forgiving – I didn’t get all the flowers lined up fully with the colour, but I think it looks OK.

All I then needed to do was attach the circle to the card front using foam pads (making sure I lined up the flower images).

I finished by adding the sentiment, which is from the ‘sweet strawberry’ set. I thought it worked with the image – not only is the hummingbird sweet in it’s own right, but it’s sipping some lovely nectar.

Thanks for dropping in. My sister & I have still got some time to wait before we can meet up again, but every day brings that closer.