Basic Owl Card
We are going to make an owl card, it seems to me that owls are very in with tweens and teenagers at the moment, and this card is also perfectly good for an adult card, or for a blank card to say hi, or congratulations to somebody.
For this card you will need:
Stampin'Write Markers or a purple ink pad
Coloured/patterned scrap paper
White, black and brown scrap paper
Glue or adhesive
Ruler
Scissors
Paper trimmer
Greetings stamp set
I used the Warmest Regards stamp set which is no longer sold, but there are plenty of other greetings stamp sets that are sold and I will share some of them with you at the bottom of this page.
Whether you are using brown as your base, or beige as your base, you will need to cut your A4 card stock into thirds, length ways. I am not good enough to do this without a ruler and, apparently, supervision from my cat, her name is Chloe.
It doesn't need to be exactly a third, don't worry if one third is half a centremetre shorter than the others.
If you are using a beige card base, then you need to cut one of your strips of brown in half again to get 1/6 of a piece of A4 card stock.
Put it into your woodgrain embossing folder.
If you are using brown as your card base, then you need to fold your 1/3 strip in half and put the front half of the card base into the woodgrain embossing folder, leaving the back half hanging out of the folder.
For an embossing folder, you need all of the tabs for your Big Shot's Multipurpose Platform to be over to the left.
This is the 1/6th piece of brown card (if you are using a beige background).
You then need to put your closed embossing folder between the two cutting plates. It is difficult to show that properly in a photo because they are clear but trust me, here we have the fat part only of the Multipurpose Platform, one cutting plate, one closed embossing folder with the card inside, and then one cutting plate.
If you are using the brown as your entire base, just leave the back part hanging out of, or over the edge of, the Multipurpose Platform.
We call this the Big Shot 'sandwich'.
Thread the empty tabs through the Big Shot first, give the 'sandwich' a gentle push and whichever way the handle turns, keep turning it in that same direction until it has cranked your 'sandwich' through.
If it is difficult to crank it through stop, you are probably doing something wrong.
Now we will make the branch for the owl to sit on. Because you do not want the entire bird, just the branch from the Builder Bird Punch, thread a strip of beige or green card stock through the punch.
You could either stamp the entire branch in green, and colour in the branch brown, or stamp the entire branch in beige, and colour in the leaves green, or stamp the entire branch in beige and then stamp the leaves in green and cut and paste them on. The last option is what is shown here but be warned, it is very fiddly.
This is the beige branch being coloured in with a green marker.
This is me cutting out the green leaves to stick them onto the beige branch (the fiddly option).
Cut out the body of your owl. Again because we don't want to use the entire punch here, we don't want the entire owl to be purple, you should use a strip of purple card stock so that you only get the owl body.
Cut out his waist coat or belly, and if you want a white heart also cut out the heart here and simply slip the patterned paper over when you stick on the heart. Alternatively, you might want to stick a little heart that matches the waist coat onto the greeting later.
Stick on his waist coat.
Cut out the biggest circle for his eyes using some brown scrap paper, I am using a paper bag here. Again, you only want a small part of the punch so cut yourself a thin strip to stick into the punch.
Stick the circles on so they touch the top of the waist coat, or they won't fit on his body.
Cut out the medium circles in white, and the tiny circles in dark brown or black. I used the off cuts of the 1/6th brown square here, when I trimmed it down to fit on the beige card base.
If you find the smallest circles to be too fiddly, you could always draw on dots using a brown or black marker, most people would not notice the difference.
Lastly stick his heart on his chest.
If you want a greeting (I am partial to no greeting so I can use the card for anything), then select your greeting and using your marker or stamp pad ink it and stamp it onto some white scrap paper. Cut out the greeting with your scissors.
Use some of the patterned paper from the waist coat to cut out a rectangle a little bigger than your greeting, stick the greeting to the patterned paper, and stick down the rest of your components to your card once you have arranged them to your satisfaction.
All of the Stampin' Up! products I used are linked in the list in the second picture, but I will repeat those links below.
Stampin'Write Markers or a purple ink pad
As I mentioned, my Warmest Regards greeting stamps are no longer available, but there are many collections of greetings that you can get and I will share some links to those below:
Or you could buy an alphabet set and type out any greeting you like, this is a big time consuming for an entire document but very effective for a short greeting.
Lastly, the Stampin'Up! Markers have a thick side (for colouring in a stamp) and a thin side, for writing. If you can print nicely, or have fancy handwriting, you could get a set of the markers and as a bonus, you also have many different colours to use on your stamps.
