Welcome back! Hope you had a great weekend stamping for Shari’s Collage Challenge. The winners will be announced on Thursday, so be sure to check back then to see who won.

In the meantime, it’s Monday — and that means a whole new weekly challenge begins. As Aaron and I were discussing what my focus for my the week should be, he said “No question, it’s gotta be birds!” I’m sort of known as The Bird Woman, ha ha! So, the challenge will be to create a stamped piece with a bird theme using at least one Hero Arts stamp.

Here’s a card to get the challenge started. I created it with our Project of the Month Set, the fun Clear Design Tree, Birds & Messages. Every month we feature a set and have four cards to give you bunches of ideas. Check out this month’s project cards here, or see the Project Gallery here for previous months.

Supplies:

• Clear Design Tree, Birds and Messages
• Kraft, Lemon, Chocolate and Green Apple notecards
• Small Accent Pearls
• Memories ArtPrint Brown and VersaColor Celadon
• Other: Polka dot paper (Making Memories), velvet ribbon (Maya Road), colored pencils (Prismacolor)

Some tips: The Tree, Birds & Messages set has a tiny flower that’s perfect for stamping over polka dots. I stamped the branch using celadon ink, and then went over it with colored pencils to add the detail.

Don’t have a bird stamp? No worries, you can still join in the challenge! We have a bird template for you. Download the PDF here, then trace it out and stamp away. Here’s a little fabric and felt bird that I created to give you some ideas:

Supplies:

• Artistic Impressions Branches
• Sparkle Clear Thank You Heart
• Medium Accent Pearls
• Memories ArtPrint Brown
• Other: White and dark brown felt, yellow fabric, embroidery floss, brown Sharpie marker

A quick how-to:

1. To create the wings, stamp a Branch twice with ArtPrint Brown on white felt. The trick here is to press evenly and hold the stamp on the felt for about 20 seconds or so that the ink has time to transfer. Set aside to dry. Note: Do not try to speed up the drying process with a heat tool — it melts the felt!
2. Trace bird body and wing on to an acetate notecard with a Sharpie. Cut out. It’s nice to use acetate for the template for better positioning. Cut out the body once from white felt, and twice from yellow fabric, cutting both of the fabric pieces out at the same time. (Fold fabric so that wrong sides are facing.) Make a sandwich with the fabric on the outside and the felt on the inside, then blanket stitch together with embroidery floss.
3. Cut legs out of brown felt and stitch on.
4. Color two Medium Accent Pearls with a brown Sharpie for eyes. Thanks to Tami for the inspiration for coloring the pearls with a Sharpie!
5. Now that the stamping on the felt should be dry, use the template to create the wings, then stitch them on the body. I just attached the bottom edge so that they could still “flap”.
6. Stamp the little “you make the world better” tag from the Sparkle Clear Thank You Heart set, and use a needle threaded with jute to attach the tag to a hanging loop for the bird.

And there you have it.

Hope you will join in the Bird Challenge — you have until 11:59 PST on Sunday, April 20th to submit your entries to the Hero Arts Flickr Group! Just use ANY Hero Arts stamp on your entry — yes, any Hero Arts stamp at all — to create a piece with a bird theme. Use the bird template or not — it’s all up to you. You’ll also need to tag your entry with the word “bird” so that we can find it. If you’ve already submitted a non-winning entry to another challenge and you’d like to submit it to this one as well, just tag it with “bird”. (See the FAQ for more on Flickr and how to tag your entry.) There will be three prizes given EACH week:

1st place: $50 of new Hero Arts stamps + a 2008 catalog

2nd place: $25 of new Hero Arts stamps + a 2008 catalog

3rd place: $10 of new Hero Arts stamps + a 2008 catalog

Be sure to visit tomorrow for more bird inspiration plus a sneak peek from our next catalog! Until then, hope you have a tweet time stamping…

Filed under: bird

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 4:04 am and is filed under Motivation Mondays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.