Hello crafty friends. My blue tit stamps from Clarity’s ‘garden birds’ set are making their annual appearance as it’s spring, and here they are busy on their bird feeder. I thought of these as soon as I saw the inspiration photo over at Just Us Girls, which I’ve paired with the sketch from Just Add Ink. They also fit the theme of ‘anything CAS plus spring animals’ at AAA cards, so I’m sharing them there as a second contribution this week!

I started by stamping the two birds onto a piece of smooth white card, then cut masks for them from an all-over sticky note (I’d lined them up against the bird feeder before using my stamping platform to stamp them). Once they were masked, I stamped the bird feeder in ‘watering can’ Archival ink, then cut a mask for that as well and covered it over. I laid a little dotty stencil from Clarity over the masks and brushed ‘broken china’ Distress Oxide through it either side of the feeder, to pick up the elements of the sketch.

I got my Perga liner pencils out again and coloured in the image. I used several browns for the seeds in the feeder, then blended yellow, greens & blues on the birds.

I added the chain for the bird feeder by using one of the ‘birthday dangles’ stamps. I blended more of the ‘broken china’ around the edge of another piece of card, mounted the stamped image on it, then attached the whole piece to a 5×7 card blank. I finished by running a black Sharpie around the edge of a Clarity word sticker before adding that to the card front.

I do love seeing the birds in spring, but sadly there aren’t any bird feeders in my garden – that would just be far too tempting for Benji the cat!