Birds and a Birdhouse

I took a few photos of a heron on the way to work the other morning. It was low tide, and the particular place the heron was standing meant that I could take photos where it didn't look as much as if I was in the centre of the city.

And here is my card for this week using images (and paper) from Art Neko.  It's a shaker card, using what I imagine to be a birdhouse from the Flowers and Whimsy sheet, along with butterflies from the same sheet, a vertical birthday sentiment and some ATC collage paper.  The base has some coarse mesh stitched to it, and I added some leaf ribbon trim with lots of Liquid Pearls to suggest flowers. I can't remember what die I was using, but the shaker element was all the little pieces popped out from it, they've been sitting in a little pot on my desk ever since.

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.

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.

Recipe Time

...and a card.
Last week's mixed media challenge on Splitcoast required us to choose three different types of tutorial from the resources section, bingo-style. I was short on time so selected scraps from my scrap box which covered various tutorials and put them together to create a little scene - and searching for a sentiment to finish it off with, this one from Art Neko seemed to work well.

The embossing-folder-stamped background was originally intended for a sea scene, that's one of the folders you gave me, Lorraine!

Blue birds on my card, and here a couple of photos not of the baby bluetits still very much in evidence in the garden but of a young robin, moulting into his adult plumage. I always feel they almost look as if they had some sort of disease at this stage!

And I promised a recipe. I had some sweet potatoes sitting in the cupboard since before we went away, and it was high time to use them. I often make soup, but wanted some different today, so I looked online for some recipes and found several which I bookmarked into my Recipes folder.

The one I tried came from the BBC Good Food website, Moroccan chicken with sweet potato mash.

I chose this recipe because I always have ras-el-hanout in my cupboard, and was able to take chicken out of the freezer so it was a meal I didn't need to go shopping for. I have been buying my ras-el-hanout from Seasoned Pioneers for about twenty years now, going back to the days of dial-up internet and long before it was trendy. In fact, I first read of it back in the days when I used to buy the BBC Good Food magazine.

Moroccan chicken with sweet potato mash: serves 4

1kg sweet potatoes, cubed
2 tsp ras-el-hanout, or a mix of ground cinnamon and cumin
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 fat garlic clove, crushed
200ml chicken stock
2 tsp clear honey
juice ½ lemon
handful green olives, pitted or whole
20g pack coriander (cilantro) leaves chopped.

Cook the potatoes for about fifteen minutes, till tender.
Meanwhile rub the seasoning into the chicken breast fillets and fry them for about 3 minutes a side, till browned, in 1 tblsp of the olive oil. Remove the chicken, lower the heat and cook the onions and garlic till soft.
Add the stock, honey, lemon juice and olives, return the chicken to the pan and cook till the sauce is reduced and thick, and the chicken done. Stir in the coriander.

Mash the potatoes, season, add a spoonful of olive oil or butter. Slice the chicken breasts into thick slices, and serve on top of a bed of sweet potato mash with the sauce poured over.

I left out the olives, as C is not a fan of them and they are not something I tend to keep in the house. I did mean to substitute dates, but forgot - I've made a note on the recipe to include them next time. Because we both enjoyed it, there will definitely be a next time - perhaps with couscous rather than the mash.

Birds...

I had a piece of faux leather background left after making my card for the Art Neko blog last week - so I used it to make a card to share here this week. This sweet bird and nest are from the Flowers and Whimsy sheet of stamps. Next up will  be a card using that lovely birdhouse image, I think.

This one is stamped on watercolour paper and coloured with distress inks. My first background, whatever brand of masking tape I used curled when I heated it, so I had to gently heat it, take it all off and start again with a different brand. Hmm, I think most of what I have left is the one that curled.

A couple of garden birds - a very wet and presumably very hungry goldfinch this morning, and a little baby blue. We seem to have a lot of birds around since we came back from holidays - maybe because all the feeders are topped up again.

We got to see a lot of birds while we were away, first of all visiting the ornithological park in the Marais Poitevin - walking distance from the campsite, and then going back to the bird park in the Camargue. We weren't lucky enough to see bee eaters this year, but did get to see avocets and were also highly entertained by these bareback riders....

Irises

Last Saturday wasn't a gloriously blue-sky sunny day, but it was nice enough for us to take a short trip to the Botanic Gardens - and we got back to the car park just as the rain started.

Here are some of the irises. They're a flower I love, we used have the big tall ones in the garden when I was a child, and for quite a number of years I had a tub full of small orchid irises  I had grown from seed - but in the end they stopped flowering and their pot cracked in the frost last winter so I threw them out and will start again some time.

So for my Art Neko card this week, no surprise that I chose to feature an iris, using a stamp from the Set of 9 Flowered ATCs.
I stamped and embossed it on watercolour paper and coloured it with Inktense pencils and distress re-inkers for the background. The layer behind it was done with watercolour pencils sanded over some watercolour paper which had a stencil laid over it and then I misted a small section at a time and sanded the pencils over it. I had thought a while back of giving away my older cheap watercolour pencils, but this is a technique I like for the soft granular textured look it gives, so I held onto them. The base was just coloured with distress ink and misted, then scored around the edges. Since the ATC image has a heavy black outline, I added black edges to my sanded watercolour panel and the base layer. Oh - and because I liked the look of the paper where there had been no stencil and it just caught all the sanded pencil, I used a strip of that along the bottom, just for fun.

Dreaming...

The Thursday challenge on Splitcoaststampers this week was "Kids and Pets", and this sweet "We're Off To See The Wizard" stamp from Art Neko seemed to fit the bill perfectly. I coloured it with pencils (and a hint of Stickles on Dorothy's shoes) and set it on a yellow brick road, adding some emeralds...and other bling. I'm not very good at knowing when to stop, and I think I overdid the Stickles. The sentiment comes from the Bookmarks and Sentiments plate.

...and Owls

The owls were mostly in large cages - apart from the Little Owl (Gizmo, aged 7) who is in the reception area. I'm sure that in the previous premises he was flying around the room freely, I remember him landing on me. He's a little sweetie!

I thought the long-eared owl looked so foxy! Made me think of carnival masks.

We were also able to handle a tawny owl. I remember when I was working in Yorkshire, I could hear them in the woods beside the house almost every single night, and I spent a lot of time outside (in February and March) trying to catch sight of one, without ever succeeding. He made the funniest little sharp clicks with his beak, which instantly reminded me of Archimedes in the Sword in the Stone. He must have been very light, because the hawk only weighed a kilo and felt quite heavy in comparison.

I made an owl card to go with my owl photos...

I used the "Wise Owl on a Branch with Calligraphy" stamp - he's stamped in brown ink on linen-finish paper sponged with distress inks, and with the ends curled round an old knitting needle to create a scroll. I crimped some kraft card for the background, sponged it with some inks and then gesso. To finish I added some trailing ivy leaves, and finally a little ladybird from the "Whimsical and Kind Sayings" set. It took me a long time to decide whether to leave the bug or not - in the end I decided that I like it better with. 

Cats...

No, not the musical. Which I've never seen, though I loved Old Possum's Book of Cats and used to know a couple of the poems off by heart - Skimbleshanks the railway cat was my favourite, followed by the Jellicle cats.

I was making a card to share this week using a lovely Siamese cat image from Art Neko, and it prompted me to dig out a couple of old memories - and photos.

As a family, we always had cats, usually three at any given time. Many were rescues, but we had a couple of more pedigree ones, and one was indeed a Siamese; Pandora. It has to be said that of all our cats she was the least likeable in terms of personality, and most like what non-cat people think of as typically feline, selfish and self-contained. But - she did love travelling in the car and consequently came on a few family holidays with us, so here's a photo of me, aged about 8 or 9, up in Donegal, the north-west corner of the country.

My own cat, whom I had from when I was about four or five till - well, she stayed at home longer than I did and lived on till after I was married, was also more pedigree than most - a Siamese-Burmese. And she was a sweetheart. My mother said that when I was very small, she always knew when I had gone to sleep because that was when Andy would join the rest of the family downstairs until they went to bed and then she'd return to my room. At one stage my mother thought she wasn't doing my bronchitis any good and tried banning her from the bedroom, but after a couple of nights when she kept everybody awake throwing herself against my door and crying, the ban was revoked. When a car hit her and broke her back leg she still insisted on sleeping on the bed, and after a couple of years recovery time was soon back ratting again. She was a devoted mother - no rats for her kittens, she managed to catch and bring rabbits back to the house a couple of times while they were still little.

Brambles was a much later addition to the family, well after I had left home. His owners were moving, and my parents took him in. He'd previously been a 100% indoor cat, and for a couple of months he lived on his own in an upstairs room while he acclimatised to the idea of living with other cats - and a dog. But as you can see from the photo below, he took very happily to spending time outdoors in the sunshine.

The card was made very simply, I inked the image with markers and huffed before stamping. A lovely line image like that doesn't need much!

Flowers

Two cards using images from the set of 9 Flowered ATCs from Art Neko: the daffodils are really breaking out all over the place now and it's lovely to see. They brighten a grey day and make a brighter one shine.





Both were made with fun backgrounds - the daffodils was done using spray starch on glossy white card, sprinkled with Brushos and with cling-wrap laid over. The poppy was done for a direct-to-paper challenge, simply swiping some distress ink pads onto the paper, then embossing and dusting with the soft pink. The orange butterflies were a failed first attempt - I used an eraser while they were still damp, trying to removed excess chalk from the background. I did that alright, but I also caused the surface of the paper to pill so it was no longer suitable for use as a focal image.

The flower sentiment is also from Art Neko, and the Happy Birthday letters were formed by stamping a vertical birthday sentiment twice - the spacing between the letters was just enough to allow me to punch them out, so long as I edged the circles in black .

February Favourites

It's been mostly a dull grey month and not many photo opportunities, although I should upload a couple of photos of a tree that came down in the storm last week...I think the lack of colour in the weather has had me adding more than normal to my cards, looking at the selection I have made.

Anyway, here are my favourites from February. I know the poinsettia one is made for Christmas and I don't normally add Christmas cards, but...

When I went to the local € store near work, I wasn't expecting to find a simple white frame as perfect as this one, I was expecting to have to do some altering. The clean white was perfect for framing the sentiment and adding the paper shells on a washed background.

And given that I have absolutely nothing Alice-related on hand, I was very pleased with how this card turned out after my initial "where on earth do I start" reaction. I started, in fact, by downloading a wonderful set of Photoshop brushes, but it was so hard to preview each one that I gave up and resorted to simply downloading a couple of the images (since they are royalty free) and printing a quote. I thought the pop-up book format suited the theme well, and I had just received the vintage playing cards and time-piece collage sheets from Art Neko, who are now also handling the B-Muse.com site.