lots of owls

Since Moira introduced me to the Hobby Art owl stamps, I have become quite addicted to these cute little guys - and I don't normally do cute! Customers at the Country Market like them too, and they often go as quickly as I can make them, it does take ages cutting them out. They are all coloured with promarkers and on distress ink backgrounds.
Branches on the edge of cards are using a Clarity stamp stencil, and the tree trunks in the background of another are also from a Clarity stencil.
The woodgrain effect was done using a Sizzix embossing folder, inking it up with brown ink and then pressing a  sheet of paper over the top - I repeated this 3 times to cover an A4 sheet of card, so that I could cut out two 6"sq pieces. Distress inks in brown and green were randomly sponged on the card to create a weathered effect, then i used a small circle die to cut the nest hole out.
The cut out bit was sponged with darker inks, then glued in place on the base card - place the main piece of card on the base first, then glue the cutout into the hole to make sure it all fits properly. The big owl was glued onto the 'hole' piece, the the main piece of card glued down and the baby owls perched on the rim of the hole. Remaining big owl sits on a diecut branch from the Stampin Up bird punch.

totally tags

Well, one tag to go with the totally tags challenge this week on Simply Stampin.  A very simple tag after the Chocolate  Baroque ones, but it seemed to take forever to do!
I used the regals designer paper patterns stack in always artichoke and night of navy as backing, I wanted 2 almost matching bookmarks for a friend who is retiring from being a Markets producer at the end of the month - one for her and one for her husband, (who will be retiring from his duties as chauffeur and general go-fer!) hence the initials.
As they are both gardeners and bird lovers as well as avid readers, I used my bird punch for only its second outing. Jean's tag has a double-sided flower on the end of the old olive grosgrain ribbon - am not sure yet what Roy's tag will have on the end of the ribbon, maybe the owl punch.
The flower was made from the stack of kraft packing paper that came with the starter SU kit - I cut out loads of small flowers using my Tim Holtz die, fastened them together with a brad and then crunched up the layers. I tried it without spraying the layers with water, and it worked fine, just making a softer flower than using card did. I rubbed the finished flowers over the night of navy ink pad before glueing them onto a matching flower cut from the DP and onto the ribbon. I think next time I will spray the flowers with re-inker or glimmer mist to give more colour.