Robin's Birdhouse: Caged beauties

Happy Friday, everyone! Today I have a greeting card to share with you. All throughout July, Altered Pages and Leaky Shed Studio are partnering to bring you projects that fly! Each day brings a new inspiration so check out both blogs often! On the Altered Pages blog, commenting on posts this month means you are entered into a drawing to win this prize! It's not too late to enter! And I would really love for one of my friends to be the lucky winner so head on over and say hello!

Altered Pages / Leaky Shed Studio Prize Package

Today I am using this lovely chipboard bird cage from Leaky Shed Studio. I have used my ink pads directly on the piece. Gray, brown and dark red dye inks were used to give it an aged look. I traced the shape of the cage onto the small yellow background square found on the Beauty In Yellow collage sheet. The women in the cage and the young girl are on the same sheet. I chose the two women for the cage because the way they were holding their lace shawl made the look (to me) like a two headed bird. The women were fussy cut and adhered to the chipboard so that both of their faces showed through the bars and then the background was attached behind them. The image of the young girl was also fussy cut and the edges of the image were brushed with the same Cat’s Eye ink pad I use for the background.

I chose to make a large card because the cage is such a wonderful size embellishment. In the end, I decided I liked it best on a 8.5 x 5.5 card. There are two additional panels and the size of the one used as my main focus was 8 x 5. I precut a panel to the correct size using a very stiff piece of card stock. Choose something light, but the color actual color doesn’t matter because once you add the paper and ink it shouldn’t show.

The background is made from a single 8 x 8 piece of paper from the Glitz Sunshine In My Soul pad. The paper was torn into random sizes and shapes. I chose a color ink from my collection that matched the best inked the edges of each side of every piece and used a glue stick to adhere them to the 8 x 5 panel. Be sure to have your tears go beyond the edge of the paper so that when you trim them off the entire panel has scrapbook paper attached. Use the ink pad and brush color all around the panel, including the cut edge of the card stock. This is the perfect time to add color to any of the torn pieces if you think it needs it.

Three butterflies from the Fairy Wings collage sheet were fussy cut and had their edges brushed with the ink pad so that none of the white paper shows. Two of these have reddish coloring and since there was nothing else red in my design I added a rusty red ink around the edges of the main panel to bring them in better. The bottom of the girl image was also brushed with the red so she would blend into the border.

The black vine on the card was one of the wonderful precut strips from Bazzill’s Just The Edge collection. The swirly border was cut in half and used to both give the flowers from my stash a vine and to hold the key to the birdcage. These lock and key metal embellishments have been in my collection forever, but Altered Pages also has metal charms. The flowers were embellished with Dew Drops and a string of pearls from an old Mailbox Muse kit (Paris, I believe).

The little beads can be slippery once they're cut apart. I used tweezers to glue them in place.

I hope you like it. The collages and chipboard pieces have so many wonderful possibilities! I hope you’ll use them and share your pieces with us on the Facebook Altered Pages page.