Juvenile goldfinches

I always think they look so different before that vivid red comes in. We seem to have several young ones around this summer.

Cards

A couple of cards featuring Art Neko stamps - both were made for the recent Dare To Get Dirty challenge on Splitcoast.

One will be a birthday card for my brother, since I bought the cog dies, along with a few other things, using the Amazon voucher he gave me for my birthday. I used the Steampunk Clock with Bird for this one, along with a discarded Brusho background from my scrap box.

The second one uses a flower from the Flowers and Whimsy sheet, and a very different colour palette to my normal.

The last card isn't really a card - it's in memory of my father. The last time he was well enough to visit the hens and not-hens (ducks) in the community garden was back in March, before he fell and broke his hip. On Tuesday I went to pay them one last visit and to say thank you to the hospital staff for their great care and kindness over the last year of my dad's life. "Amazing" was one of the few words left in his vocabulary as it diminished over the last months.

Birds of a feather...

A few bird photos... a rare sighting of a bullfinch making the most of the rowan berries - on a rare sunny morning. And since the buses are all arriving early these days with school still off, I'd missed one bus and knew I had plenty of time to get the camera out.

Just the day before we had seen such a fat and red-breasted chaffinch on the niger seed feeder ( a first to see one there, they're normally ground-feeders) that we spent a long time looking at him to make sure he was a chaffinch.

We went for a walk in St. Catherine's Park on Friday afternoon for some time out, and spotted these little ducklings still growing into their adult plumage. I thought their tails looked so funny too, all fanned out. They swam over to us obviously hoping for some treats, but we had nothing to give them.

And lastly a very scruffy moulting robin I spotted this evening; he looked a little piratical with that black patch under his eye.

July Favourites

Where did July go?  I have a few favourite cards, but it was a really busy month so I didn't have a lot of stamping time.  First up are a couple I made for the Dare To Get Dirty challenge currently running on Splitcoaststampers.

I used stamping with bubble-wrap as the technique challenge last week and ended up with a lot of backgrounds using various mediums - some still waiting to be turned into cards. Here I used paint, and the ladybird one is Brusho powders.

And for a challenge to use heat - my first card has Tyvek painted with acrylic medium and Perfect Pearls, and the second also uses Perfect Pearls for the "heated pearls" technique.

I had very few photos from last August in my files, but I did find several of a little bluetit perching on one of the feeders.