Gardening with the birds...

I've been trying to dig part of the border at a time, so as not to end up too stiff. You can see I haven't quote got as far as where the little robin is in the first picture. I am not sure what it was up to, it was peering around and then flapping it's wing. A bit the way some birds to to act as a decoy when a predator is too near their nest. In this case, as the second robin appeared in no time, it was almost as if it was signalling. Surely not, though!

 I love this upward shot - I was lying on the grass waiting for the robin to land in my bowl of compost, but took this while it was perched on the wall above me.

Checking the weed container out for any tasty titbits...

I was honoured to be invited as April Guest Designer for Mami Doodles by Elisa. I love Elisa's style - if I scrapped, I'd like my pages to look like hers. We informally swap ATCs and cards from time to time - I have an ATC with a predecessor of the little Midori girl sitting under my monitor right now.
I am not a big fan of digital images - mostly because they don't seem to work well with watercolours. But I had great fun with the images Elisa sent me - I've liked Asian style images as long as I can remember. As soon as I saw the paper piecing image, I wanted to make a little paper doll you could dress.
There are tabs on her dresses, but then I also used Sailor two-way glue as repositionable glue, so that I could "hang" them in the wardrobe. And although originally I was going to just pop the little girl up on thick foam dots, I realised that she'd be easier to dress if you could remove her altogether, so I used a Basic Grey magnetic snap to attach her to the card.  Then all my ideas of how to make a suitable background were too complicated, so I just used some fancy textured Bazzill and a little cloud of butterflies.
Kimono papers were downloaded from the Canon Creative website, scaling them down. I reckon the whole card could be tied with nice ribbon or else a belly band in more of the chiyogami paper to keep it closed - it would sort of tie in with the little obi.
Apart from the wardrobe and the interchangeable dresses, it doesn't bear a whole load of relationship to my original concept, but I certainly had fun.