Cheerful Chirps

This was the name of the class from Spellbinders taught by Kim Kesti at my recent SCT Crop and Create Delivered event. I just love these cards they make me happy looking at them but there was a lot of homework beforehand and it took so much longer than the time allotted for Sarah and I to keep up with. As this was the first class the two of us were doing it really got us to off behind the end ball. We started on our Saturday at 8am and went to bed at 11pm that day with all but 2 cards finished from the day. so it slowed us down a bit and we probably went to bed later than we thought but didn't in the end impact on our day's crafting. I'll also blame my local Turkish takeaways they were so busy on Saturday night we should have gone into the Thai next door, that also lost us 40 minutes of our crafting time.

Spellbinders were very generous with our kit we received 2 fabulous bird die sets: Cheerful Chirps Flying High and Pretty Birds; a Bamboo Scree 3D embossing folder, Spread Your Wings sentiments stamp set (but I was shocked at the quality of the stamp set, saying that its stamped OK if you were gentle but I had one real faulty sentiment which they said they would replace, Sarah's by the way stamped fine), yellow sequins and a pack of ColorWheel cardstock which had some new colours I hadn't seen before in it (Sicily, Mulberry, Violet, Orchid, Oceanside and Peach Bellini). The pack of  was half a sheet of each card. They also gave every attendee one of their fine mister bottles as well, so I now own 2.

First card we created I learnt the crown of the parrot goes behind the head and they actually had alignment lines so my front piece is a bit torn plus my sentiment got embossed a bit too so not off to a great start but it is really pretty and I'm sure the lucky recipient won't see the errors.

The second card we worked with the second die set and we created our own background just dry embossing a line every 1/2" on the base panel.

The last card we used a bird from each set plus used the wing from one of the sets to change the wee bird up too. We trimmed our embossed panel and added a wee strip of a close colour behind it but as you can see it's quite hard to get your cuts so precise and I would probably just use the whole panel next time, which would also give me more room to add all the elements to the card (it was very tight).

All the images have had some extra blending with Distress Oxides to add some shading in places or to highlight the embossing. This truly was a magical and fun class and would be my favourite if not so fiddly. I do love die cut cards but they can be a lot of work but they do have a lot of WOW. What was also confusing was we were given for our homework a generic die-cutting list so it meant we had to sort out for each card what die cuts were going on it amongst the 133 other die cuts in our tray (I just did a quick count but approx. 133) and Kim our tutor had her die cuts arranged by card so she was able to glue quicker than us. This is Kim's sneaks below. I also have to say buying the Sweet Petunia Precision Glue Press has been one of my best crafting purchases for 2024. I think glue everywhere would have driven me bonkers as so many die cuts but there's very little mess using this glue gun, it is precise and controllable.

Just blogging these cards makes me happy so another fabulous item to add to your wishlist for when fully released.

✿Karen✿