Chooks - Playing with snippets

This is one of those cards that is more about the fun of making it than the end result.

I have no idea of how I did it, but early last week I pulled a muscle or something, in my back, so I couldn't do a lot of my usual 'stuff', and I spent a lot of time just sitting with a hot mud-pack strapped to me. (A random buy at Lidle's a few months ago which turned out to be really comforting and helpful). One good thing that came from it is that the most comfortable chair for me turned out to be the high-back office chair in my craft room! So I have had time to just play and I decided to try something with my silhoulette cameo machine, that has been on my 'to try' list for ages, but I always seem to be too busy. I wanted to have a go at layering vinyl cuts. That doesn't mean putting one layer on top of another, but rather to cut a shape from the centre of something, and replace it exactly with the same shape in a different colour.

If I had been sensible - which I am not -  I would have chosen a fairly large, simple shape to start with. Instead I used a file of a tiny chicken with an inset heart. (Five tiny chickens actually. This is just one of them). The rectangle it is on, measures 2cm x 3½cm !

One of my Wednesday sewing group friends does beautiful 'folk-art' quilting, and she recently made a kitchen banner featuring cute little chooks. I borrowed her pattern thinking I might downsize one for a card one day, but, although I copied them, I had never used them. So first I scanned them in and traced them to make the cutting lines. Then I downsized them so that they would fit along a DL card, and started to cut them. Everything had been magnified on the screen and I hadn't realised just how small they actually were until I came to cut them. I had to separate each chicken into his component parts, and cut them individually, so I found my folder of vinyl snippets. (Yes I have enough of them to make a new snippets folder!).  I only needed tiny pieces about one centimeter square to cut each heart, and 2cm square for each body. Then I used the corners of each of these squares to cut the combs, feet and beaks in contrasting colours. 

I weeded the bodies, (lifted out the spare, unwanted areas), without taking them off the backing paper, and added the hearts, beaks, feet, combs etc while they were there. I set them aside while I thought about what I could do with them.

From my paper snippets boxes I found little pieces of paper to cut fish-tail flags, and used transfer tape to lift each complete chicken and position it on a flag. It was very fiddly, and some of the beaks were not very willing to let go of the transfer tape, but I got there in the end. I then found a piece of suitable DP from a magazine I think, to cover the base card. I couldn't find one that really showed all the flags very clearly, so to get around that I matted each flag onto dark brown card, leaving a very narrow border. I made a hanging line with baker's twine, and glued each flag to it.

Finally I used my Britannia alphabet die, in all capital letters, and some more tiny snippets of the vinyl, to cut the greeting, and stuck this along the lower edge. And here is the completed card.

 As I said, it was a lot of work but I enjoyed trying it. I have a brother-in-law who is 90 in a week or two. I might find a gold number 9 and 0 to stick on it and send it to him. You probably think it is an odd design for such an occasion, but what do you put on a card for a ninety year old?! If it makes him smile, then it will have done all it needs to.

In the meantime, I will link it up in Pixie's Snippets Playground, because I sure used up some tiny pieces of both vinyl and paper to make it.