The Owl Service

Does anyone else remember the children's book "The Owl Service" by Alan Garner? I used to love that, and somehow every time I see a stylised owl used in crafting I think of it, even though the owls in the book were on china and not card.

Anyway, I digress. This morning I dug out an old issue of Craft Stamper, from way back in 2009, and had a play with the cover stamp, making a couple of projects inspired by the ones designed for the stamp in the magazine. The patterned paper I've used is a NBUS owl design from my stash, it's a 12 x 12 with a pretty scalloped edge - I've made use of the edge in my cards.

For the first card, I wanted to have the owl sitting on a branch in front of the die cut moon, but I don't have a branch die and the only branch stamp I have was the wrong size for the card, so I cut my branch freehand from a snippet of brown card.

I am sharing this card with
Crafty Creations Challenges - Out on a limb
Fan-tastic Tuesday - Cute
Shopping Our Stash - Put a bird on it   

For my second card, I used the side border of my patterned paper, giving the rest of the green card a hand-doodled "zig zag stitch" frame using a white gel pen. I die cut a circle in the green card and again used the white gel pen to frame it, this time with "running stitch". I placed another piece of the owl paper behind the opening and made my owl sit on the edge, then stamped a greeting, "stitched" around the edge with a brown marker and finished it off with flowers from my stash.

I an sharing this card with

House of Cards - Stitching, real or faux
Fab'nFunky - Doodle

I've still got about half of my owl paper left, so keep an eye open for a sequel to this post (perhaps I'll *really* confuse you and call it Elidor!)