Tips on A Little Birdie Told Me

Tip One: Do not eat cheddar sunchips while stamping or you'll have to find a way to cover up your cheesey fingerprints (hence the giant Prima flower stack that you'll see on a similar card in a later post).

Tip Two: Pay attention when lining up your phrase or it makes the whole card look a little drunk.

Tip Three: attach metal embellishments with Stampin' Up! mini glue dots with great stick-a-bility. To get the dots off the waxy, non-stick paper onto your item, press your item onto the dot, the dot will pull away with your item, and you won't have to fight to get the dot off your finger.

Stamp mounting TIPS for the little birdies: Before you even mount your stamps, you may notice that the large bird and the central phrase are on the same piece of rubber and are meant to live together that way forever.

But it doesn't have to be this way. You can mount them separately! I preferred them separate from one another so that I can put the sentiment wherever I want to.

However, you need to remember to remember that you did this, rather than thinking it came that way because otherwise, you'll spend needless time scouring your work surface patting piles of scraps, looking under your desk, incriminating your dogs, only to find, when you go back and count the stamps, that there are 12 in the set, and you count 12 blocks ... Learn from my mistake, people.

Back to the actual act of stamping these birds for paper piecing. Stamp your birdies' bodies on small scraps of designer paper - and don't worry about the legs.

[said in your best monster truck rally advertising voice:]
Stamp the bodies, BODIES, BODIES, because you'll NEVER NEED THE LEGS!
Ahem. Back to stamping.

Then cut them out of your designer paper, snipping off the tops of their legs, and even their beaks! Cutting off the beaks was figured out after this picture was taken, but you can see the clean lines that resulted from this decision in the first picture in this post (from a different card front), versus the second picture.

Stamp your two whole birdie buddies on a piece of cardstock that you'll use for your central image. Add hats, umbrella, flower, whatever you'd like at this point. Since these are B-day birdies, they've got hats.

Fill in birdie body #1 with some glue - I used Stampin' Up 2-Way glue. Try to stay in the lines, but don't freak out if you don't.

Lay your birdie body cutout over your glue covered silhouette, and press it into place.

TIP! You may have some glue overlap, but that can be handled with an Adhesive Remover. This little gizmo is just under $2 and lasts for months and months. It works to remove adhesive spillage from 2-Way glue, rubber cement, glue sticks, etc. Anything but actual tape. You just let your adhesive dry and then rub the Remover over the affected area and it balls it up for removal.

TIP! This results in adhesive "boogers" being stuck on the corners, but when enough pile up, just take your scissors (but probably not your "good" scissors), and snip, snip them off! Good as new, and only marginally smaller.

Thanks for looking, and let me know if you have any questions!