happy birdie

i confess that when i saw this week's super sketchy sunday sketch at 365 cards i was very briefly stumped...i think it was the trapezoid:

luckily, they also showed a bunch of gorgeous DT cards made from the sketch, including one by my lovely friend ~amy~ that not only cleared up my puzzlement but made me want to tackle the project immediately. so i did:

(patterned paper: pink paislee, american crafts, we r memory keepers, prima; flowers cut with a graduated cuttlebug die out of some vintage leatherette; pearls & gem: kaiser; ink: colorbox; pen: copic outliner; embroidery floss: dmc; magnetic clasp: basic grey--inside card to hold the top bit flat when shut; frances meyer chipboard bird & heidi swapp heart used as templates for tracing)

my card is a tri-fold, and i confess i needed a couple of go's before i got a proportion i liked. it's not exactly the same as in the sketch, but if you're working with a 12 x 12" sheet of paper and want something bigger than 4" square, the only flexibility is to make it wider!

i think i'm also going to send this in to cards magazine's current challenge, where they want to see trees and branches! when i was thinking about that, i liked the idea of letting woodgrain paper represent the tree, and cloud paper represent the sky, and adding in some some leafy shapes--or in this case--a stylized branch. then all i needed was a little bird (i traced a chipboard shape) and a few embellies--my favorite being the white hand-stitching inside the outlines of the clouds, for texture--and i was all set!