Birthday Card for my Crafting Buddy.

I'm well and truly hooked on the Heidi Swapp Mega Masks at the moment and I used one of the smaller circles on the sheet to create a card for my lovely friend Jo.

We met on the internet just over a year ago through our mutual love of Elusive Images stamps and our admiration of the company's owner/designer Glenda Waterworth, whose blog Artylicious, we both visited and commented on frequently. After emailing each other several times and talking over all things crafty we met irl at a Graphicus workshop and really got on well together. Since then we email each other on a very regular basis, supporting and encouraging each other in our 'crafty' endeavours. It's great to be able to discuss anything to do with craft and know that you're not boring the other person to death (as happens sometimes with my OH).

As well as emailing we do try to have craft related outings every so often and again, it's really good to be able to share the excitement of going to a workshop or a craft show with a good friend and I look forward to many more of these outings with Jo.

I know she's going to be feeling embarrased but I just have to say how much her emails lift my mood if I'm feeling a bit down in the dumps. She always manages to put something in that makes me smile and I know that she has at least one other crafty friend who thinks the same. So thank you Jo and a very Happy Birthday to you for last Sunday.

Now on to the details of the card and I'll try to be brief. I used DIs to blend a fairly light background to the circle and did position a small bird and branch mask (again Heidi Swapp) but I ended up almost obliterating it with stamping

.

All the various stamps I used are from Elusive Images (available from Graphicus) and I stamped the little bird on the branch twice so that I could make it nice and bright and then cut it out and layered it onto the card. I then used Glossy Accents to give it shine. I stamped and embossed the bird with the curly tail and then coloured it with H20s, cut it out and positioned a feather behind the tail before adding it to the card on foam pads.

I blended chalk ink on the pretty block circle stamp and cut it out with my Nestabilities and then stamped the sentiment and inked the edges. Finally, I arranged the little flowers and added a bit of bling.

I think just about everything I used on this card I bought from Graphicus except for the basic card stock and the feather and self adhesive diamante stones which were in my stash.

List of EI stamps used : Damask Blocks

Design-a-Tree

Live out Loud

Curly Birds

Sentiment is from a Graphicus Guild exclusive stamp plate.