Owl Always Love You

Whew! It's been a rough week and a half around here. Let me just say that 5 people sick with a stomach virus sharing one bathroom is NOT pretty. But at least that's over. If any of you are going through something similar at your house, believe me, I sympathize. Here's hoping that all of you out there in bloggerville are doing well and staying strong and healthy.

Well, today my husband had off work, and we took advantage of the morning while the kids were in school and went shopping together. Thanks to four 40% off coupons (one each in two stores) I was able to pick up a few papercrafting supplies that I've had on my wish list for a while now, including a heat embossing tool, clear embossing powder, a versamark pad, and a wood grain background stamp. And since A.C. Moore currently has all their loose scrapbooking paper on sale at 40% off, I was able to pick up some pretty patterns as well.

Then I came home and decided to put all my lovely new tools to use.

I had a completely different card in mind using a completely different stamp set, but it didn't seem to be working out, so I ended up going in a new direction. Papercrafting, as I'm learning, is all about letting your supplies speak to you and going with the flow.

So I stamped the wood grain stamp with the versamark pad, and embossed it using the clear embossing powder and the heat tool. And let me tell ya, that thing gets HOT. You've really got to keep the stream of air moving, and in a direction AWAY from your fingertips. On this kraft colored card stock, it came out looking almost like brown ink, but the embossing did add a nice texture to the card.

After trying the green leaf paper in a few different ways, I realized that with the wood grain stamp it almost looked like a tree (until then I was still going in the other direction) so I cut out another piece and layered the two like leafy branches.

I remembered that I'd picked up one of those little $1 studio g stamp sets with an owl theme, so I dug that out and thought the sentiment was perfect, but I wasn't sure about the owl stamp. Luckily, I'd also grabbed a sheet of paper with owls on it this morning, so I decided to cut one out, then on second thought, cut out two. The second, yellow owl added a shot of sunny color, plus it balanced out the blank space on the sentiment nicely.

And I just happened to have a spool of ribbon from a different project over a year ago that matched perfectly. And thanks to the notecard notebooks I made last month, I had a spare cream colored envelope that was just the right size for the card.

The next time I make a card like this, I think I'll try doing some masking. I'll cut a tree trunk silouette out of scrap paper, and stamp in the blank space onto the card to make the wood grain stamp look more like an actual tree. But even as it is, I think it turned out pretty cute. What do you think?