Tim Holtz’ Bird Crazy stamps have been taking the stamping world by storm and I have become totally hooked on these incredibly versatile characters. When I first saw the stamps I didn’t particularly like them because I thought they were too angular for my taste. But then I started to see what people were doing with them and I just had to have them. They have taken over my world and I’ve been trying all sorts of different themes and challenges to stretch my imagination. I had made over 30 different cards before I realised that I hadn’t even made a standard ‘Happy Birthday’ card.
I am just so impressed by their versatility, and how many different scenes and characters you can devise from the same 6 birds. I like that they are perfect as stand alone images for the ‘Clean and Simple’ style that I favour but you can also group them together as a crowd or incorporate them into a scene. There are just so many possibilities that my mind just goes into overdrive and I’m dreaming up the next combinations. I will share some of these cards with you over a few posts.
These are my first cards, Clean and Simple series, trying to use each of the birds and with different sentiments and themes:
Then I got inspired by the Halloween garb in the matching Crazy Things and Crazy Thoughts stamp sets. I don’t celebrate Halloween myself but with nephews crazy about Harry Potter, I decided to turn each of them into wizards for a ‘Harry Potter series‘. I looked up some different spells on a Harry Potter website and on the inside of the card have a description of each of the spells. Also on the inside of the card is ‘Happy Birthday Muggle’ (those of you who know me will appreciate the extra dimension that adds for my family).
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- Immobulus is the Freezing Charm, a spell which immobilises living targets. It can also be used to disable Muggle burglar alarms.
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- Expelliarmus is the Disarming Charm, a defensive charm which forces the victim to release whatever they were holding at the time
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- Bombarda is the incantation of a charm used to provoke small explosions
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- Expecto Patronum is the Patronus Charm, the most famous and one of the most powerful defensive charms known to wizardkind. This ancient and mysterious charm conjures a magical guardian, a projection of all your most positive feelings
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- Baubillious is a charm that releases a bright, yellow-white bolt of lightning from the tip of one’s wand when cast.
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- Cistem Aperio is the incantation of a charm that is used to blast open a trunk, chest, box or crate with a burst of white light
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- Crazy Birds do Harry Potter
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- Happy Birthday Muggle
On a roll from using all of the birds in a theme, I decided to see whether I could make all of them look feminine in a ‘Girls out on the town‘ series. I borrowed some of the ideas from other images I had seen online and expanded my theme to include all the birds, each with a distinctive style and colour scheme of their own. I had great fun with diamantes and frills and making suitable handbags. I didn’t have suitable sentiment stamps so I printed out the words using my computer and then just hand drew the lines around them so that they looked like some of the stamp sets I had seen on line and made a feature of the sentiment box in colours matching their outfits.
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- Crazy Birds do Girls on the Town
I hope you enjoyed these and can use them as inspiration for your own cards. The sets of cards will make great gifts in their own right (Sorry, spoiler alert to those who are regular recipients of my card sets). I will share more cards in further posts (once people who some of the cards are destined for have had their birthdays or events).
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