Is a bird in the hand worth two on a card ?

 

It's my Nephew's 30th birthday today - Happy Birthday Iain.  He's celebrating during a holiday down in Cornwall so I won't be seeing him on his special day this year.  I wanted to make a card for him that was a bit 'different'.  Cards for men are always difficult I find and I didn't want to use the usual 'male' images - football, cars, beer etc, nor did I want to make a typical 'number birthday' card for his spcial day.

I was inspired by some work I saw during a recent trip to the Birds in the Barn craft shop in Essex with my lovely crafting buddy Lauren.  This shop is a veritable 'Aladdin's Cave' of craft and I could easily have spent the whole day in there mooching around and dropping the odd thing or ten into my basket.  There is a Garden Centre in the same location and they offer the most splendid cheese scones in their restaurant which I just had to try - they came highly recommended by Lauren and another of my crafting buddies Kathy so it would have been just plain rude not to have tried them !  My pals were not wrong, the scones were delish. 

Anyway, I digress, in the BitB shop a couple of sets of Dylusions stamps, which I'd been lusting over for a while, just happened to drop into my basket, one of which included the splendid bird images I've used on today's card. 

Firstly, I used a couple of colours of Dylusions Ink to spray/splatter/drip randomly onto the base card, then overstamped the two birds at the bottom using Tuxedo Black Memento ink.  I used one of the flowers from the set as a 'sun' stamped over a splash of bright yellow ink at the top. 

It's a very simple design but I am really pleased with it and may well be experimenting with similar designs using other inks and more of the stamps from this set.  I'm loving the more Clean and Simple (CAS) designs recently, although I do still love to colour my stamped images too !

Thanks for calling in to check my project today, hope you've enjoyed your visit - I do hope you'll come back again real soon.