A Secret Garden

Hello everyone on a rather blustery day down South, although the sun is trying to peep out from behind the grey clouds. I hope you're all having a good week so far.
You may want to get a cuppa and a biscuit before you start reading as this post is rather long!
I have a little piece of art to show you which was the creative result of thinking about this week's Take A Word Challenge - Green - and what green actually means to me. I've decided on 3 things, the first being Spring when everything begins to green up after Winter, the second one is the ecological green and in particular recycling and the third thing is green in the sense of inexperienced which in this case I took to be a child.
I challenged myself to include all of these things and here is the finished piece:

The base of the piece is made from a piece of packaging and I painted it with green gold and olive acrylic paints and then stamped on a flourish design (My Paper World from The Craft Barn) with Olive Green Stazon ink. I then painted a strip of corrugated card saved from a file I bought with the same paints only I painted the olive first on this one for a different effect. The strip had 2 holes already punched in it so I tied on some ribbons recycled from clothing (the sort the shops put on to stop things falling off hangers).
The circular piece is made from a piece of circular packaging and had a hole in the middle but I covered this up. I made a circular piece of decorated paper using my Distress Ink Grunge Background Technique (link to tutorial on side bar) using Crushed Olive Distress ink and the same flourish stamp. I then cut out a further circle, embossed it with the Tim Holtz Texture Fade Damask folder and then sponged on Shabby Shutters Distress ink. I swiped the ink pad over the top of the raised areas to add a little contrast.
I stamped the Sleeping Boy image by La Blanche (now available from Sir Stampalot) with VersaFine Olympia Green ink, coloured just the roses and leaves with pencils and cut him out. I added the image to the circular panel with foam tape.
I finished off with some leaf sprays rescued from an old flower arrangement and a butterfly from my stash - not recycled but I think the pink on the wings nicely picks out the pink of the roses.

My piece of artwork is for the following challenges:
Take A Word - Green
Stampin' Royalty - Texturize

I've now got some not very good photos to show you of the visitor we had in our garden early this morning, eating the spilt bird food under the tree where the bird feeder is hanging. Not that unusual you might think, but we live one road back from the seafront!

The photos are not brilliant as I had to hang out of the bedroom window so as not to frighten the pheasant off before I could take some pics.

Thanks for looking and hope you enjoyed the photos.
Fliss xx

Bird's The Word!

Morning peops and sorry about the title of this post - I couldn't resist! I have a card to show you that I'm entering in the Take A Word challenge which this week is Birdlife and it's given me the opportunity to show you a card that I actually made as a sample for Nikky and it's been sitting there waiting for the right challenge.

The little bird and bird cage come from the Polka Doodles Paper Boutique Volume 3 CD and I used the black and white digital stamps to make my card. I coloured everything with various Promarkers and decided to make the cage look distressed and vintage.
I achieved this (I hope!) by inking it with embossing ink and then embossing with verdigris, copper and tarnished gold embossing powder to give a rusty, aged effect.
I used some of the pretty papers on the CD to make the background and then created a large flower using some of the black and white digis on the All Around & Everywhere CD, printing some out on patterned paper and colouring others with Promarkers. Some paper flowers and a pearl were added to make the centre.

I'm also entering this one in this week's Stamp Something challenge which is Use A Digi.

Hoping that you all have a lovely week and thanks for looking.
Fliss x