Holiday Robins

I have just returned from a week's holiday in Clonikilty, S.Ireland, and while there, I took quite a collection of bird photos. But the one I really liked was this perky little robin who sat on a dead thistle head right by the rail where I was leaning to look out over the sea at Inchydoney Bay.

So I decided to use it to make some Christmas cards. (I am way, way behind this year and need to do some big batches fairly fast!).

I chose a Winter background paper from a digital scrapbook kit, and in Adobe PS I cropped the robin and added him to the background. I resized it to fit a 15cm square card and printed it, cut it out and made a base card in plain white.

Going through my frame dies I settled on the second layer of Spellbinders fantastic ovals, and used a plain oval die to remove the centre. Then I glued it over the robin and masked any lines where the photo met the paper with stickles silver ice. I should have blended the photo into the paper before I printed it, but with time being of the essence, I didn't start again! I also added some glitter glue to the plants in the photo to give it a more Wintery feel.

For the sentiment I used a Joanna Sheen Signature die. It is larger than I usually use for a sentiment, but it worked well on this fairly plain background. I cut it from silver mirri-card to match the frame.

Happy with the result I then printed off more of the images, and made a set of six cards. Unfortunately when I came to make the frames and sentiments I found I was just about out of silver mirri-card, so I had to scrabble through my metallic snippets box to find pieces of dark silver (pewter?), and various holographic designs, for the other cards. As long as the frames and sentiments matched on each one, it was fine.

I then decided to try something else with my photo so this time I used another digital background and a Winter cluster png file also from a scrapbook kit. This cluster had a space for a photo so I slid my robin in and sized it down to fit, and again I printed off a 15cm square copy, and glued it to a plain white base card.

This time I used another quite large sentiment die by Creative Expressions - a Sue Wilson design. Again I had to find snippets of shiny card for these. The one in the photo is very holographic, but others were plainer, but at least I have used up quite a few of my oddments. Now I will have to tour all the todo shops and see if one has some silver mirri-card! I finished it off again with glitter glue on the foliage and the larger snowflakes from the cluster frame.

Again it seemed sensible to make a set of six of these, so I now have a dozen cards to add to my collection.

I had to change two toner cartridges mid-way through the printing and as you can see, the backgrounds are different shades, but I felt they were all quite acceptable. (None of them are as pink as they look in this photo!) The one good thing about my new laser printer is that there is no colour change when I add the stickles like I sometimes had with the inkjet prints.

All those bits of shiny card mean these two can wing their way over to Pixie's Snippets Playground #254.