simon says stamp: early birds

Hi crafty friends, welcome to this week's Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge! Thank you for joining us us for last week's Play with Paint Challenge, and we hope you will join us again this week for the Early Birds Challenge. This week our challenge is Early Birds and we are challenging you to add a feathered friend or maybe you could interpret the theme as an early morning sunrise, or maybe you can think of something else!

Today, I used one of my FAVORITE new birds…the Tim Holtz Sizzix Colorize Arthur. This guy is one of the new Sizzix Seasonal dies for Halloween, but I can tell he is going to be a favorite all year long. To create Arthur, I took the die out of the packages and separated the dies by color family. If you have not used Colorize dies before, they are etched with the colors and a number on the back of the die. For instance, Arthur has Purple 1, Purple 2…all the way through 5 because he is purple on the packaging. I just substituted blues for my card (and a bit of brown). But cutting and laying ALL your pieces out in advance really makes it easy to assemble. There is a great video on the Sizzix You Tube channel as well to help you assemble him. 

 

I cut all of the pieces for Arthur and layered him together. Then I assembled him, one of my new favorite tools to use to pick up and layer the tiny little pieces is the Studio Katia embellishment wand…it has just the right amount of 'stick' to pick up the tiny pieces and layer them onto each other. I bought a white replacement tip just to make sure color did not get onto my card pieces. For the branches, I cut them out of Tim Holtz Woodgrain Cardstock and sprayed the bigger branch with Gathered Twigs Distress Spray stain and the smaller with a combo of Antique Linen and Brushed Corduroy Distress Spray Stains. I also used the spectacles from the Santa's Wish die and cut them out of Metallic cardstock. 

 

Once Arthur was assembled, I cut the Falling Stars die out of yellow cardstock and then adhered it to a black mat using foam tape. Once that was done, I adhered it to a black cardstock mat, then adhered Arthur and the branches and added a Big Talk Snarky Sticker to complete the card. 

The lovely folks at Simon Says Stamp are generously giving away a $25 voucher to shop at the Simon Says Stamp Store! All you have to do is take our your crafty supplies, make something following this week's prompt and add your project to the InLInkz at the bottom of the post on the SImon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog 🙂 All winners are chosen randomly, so anyone can be a winner!!!