Woo-Hoo --- A steampunk owl!

Birds are a miracle!  That they can sing songs to make one's heart swell, fly like gravity-defying acrobats, and look like a painting-come-to-life are only some of the reasons I feel that way.  They touch me and move me in a way that I can't fully explain.  And then there are owls.  I love taking photographs of birds.  I've managed to capture some wonderful images over the years.  But never an owl.  That would be one of the top items on my Bucket List:  to photograph an owl.  I really don't care which of the many species of owl it winds up being, but I want to take a photograph of a live owl in the wild.

I have many pieces of jewellery and also some pieces of art that feature either owls or an owl.  They draw me to them and I can't resist them.  I love owls.

At the Farmer's Market last week there were several dies that caught my interest but none quite so much as the pair of steampunk-style owls.  The shapes were unmistakably owls and the steampunk style simply made them more interesting.  I had to have them and, luckily, they were within my budget.

How serendipitous, therefore, that I found a challenge that is featuring owls this week!  It immediately caught my interest and I began throwing ideas around in my head, thinking of the many ways in which I might use my dies.  In the end I found another challenge that seemed perfect as a jumping-off point for my design and so a card was born.

I kept the colours to a neutral white and black with some silver thrown in.  The owl is cut from Whisper White and then I coloured three of the gears contained in the die-cut with my Silver Stampin' Dazzle Marker.  The gears (also discovered at the same Farmer's Market) were cut from Silver Foil.  The ribbon is the Stampin' Up! 1/8" Silver Ribbon.  For the background I stamped the Basic Black layer using the retired Off the Grid stamp and Silver Encore ink.  The sentiment, which is a combination from the Just Sayin' stamp set and the Hello Love stamp set, is heat embossed using Silver Embossing powder.

It's a deceptively simple card with a lot of levels of interest.  I loved creating it.

The challenge featuring owls is the (PIN)spiration Challenge.

The challenge that provided the sketch on which I based my design is CAS(E) this Sketch!