The Bee and the Wood Pecker!

Hello!

I think it has been at least a million years since I played along with the Paper Smooches Sparks Challenge!!  So at long last, I decided to play along for this week's challenge.  It's a "Cool Shades" colour challenge and at first, I was a bit intimidated by the colours.  But that's kind of the point of a challenge - to take you out of your comfort zone and let the creativity go to work.  And I had a ton of fun making this card!

Here are the challenge colours:

And here's my card:

I wanted to make a birthday card (you can never have enough of those on hand!) and I was totally inspired by the bee.  I bought this set as a Valentine's set, but loved that I could it in another context!  The happy and the day are from Sentiment Sampler and the Bee is from the Valentine set (can't remember what it's called, but it is the sweetest set ever!).  I did a bit of masking to achieve the sentiment I wanted, including masking out the "a" in happy and replacing it with a heart.  The flowers are from Reflections and the kraft coloured leaves were punched from a very old punch I have in my stash.  I STILL do not have any dies or a die cutting machine!!!  Good grief!!!

I also wanted to share a photo with you that I took last weekend.  I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a wood pecker perched on a tree in our backyard.  We are so fortunate to have a lot of sweet little creatures come and visit us regularly in our backyard - birds, bunnies, squirrels and rumour is there are deer that come by as well (although I haven't seen one yet).  But this little wood pecker just took my breath away, and he was happy to pose for pictures for quite some time before he fluttered off.

I hope he comes back to visit soon!  And hope you enjoyed your visit to see me today - THANK YOU for coming!!

Shannon