Let no-one else's work evade your eyes

How's this for a market find - a set of Stampin' Up stamps, featuring BIRDS, my favourite subject! It's called "Seasonal Birds" and it dates from 2002, before SU was in Australia. When I bought them they were badly mounted - the person who did them obviously hadn't been shown how to cut the stamps out properly - so I had to get them off the mounts, trim them, and stick them back on. Twenty seconds in the microwave loosens the adhesive, for your information. The mission was a complete success, and I had a new set of stamps, just to my taste.

So, what to do with them? I didn't find anything about this set in Split Coast (they have a fairly comprehensive list of all SU sets, with samples). So I had to do a wider search. I came across this lovely blog entry by Asela Hopkins of "Hop Art". No, really, go there and read it all before you finish this.

OK, you back? Isn't she good? And what a great use of the stamps!

So of course I copied. Here's a picture of me in the middle of colouring a birdy, with my reference material (her blog displayed on the iPod) at the table in front of me. I thought that made a nice photo.














After the colouring stage I tried hard to stop copying. So the layout is different now, and I've added a completely different stamp. This is a tag from "Terrific Tags Too", also from Stampin' Up. It matches quite well. Also I've just bought the SMALL tag punch, to go with the large one I already had, so I HAD to use them together.

Here's a close up birdy for you - the autumn one. Asela didn't use this stamp in her example, so I had to actually think about the autumn colours. I added the "Jasmine" pencil to the mix (it's a creamy yellow), and hardly touched the dark green.












So if you like this, go and leave Asela a friendly comment - she's feeling poorly right now, and I'm sure she'd be pleased.

And here's a final message for my far-off muse who doesn't know me at all ...