Chickadee Christmas Card

The last couple of months, I've been struggling with my card making.  Since January I've had some physical challenges with my health. But yesterday and last night I was able to assembly line cut, die cut and emboss the elements I needed to make ALL my May 52 Christmas Card Throwdown cards..  I had been thinking on what I wanted to do earlier in the week when my husband son and I were babysitting our friends' 5 month old great dane-shepherd mix.   She is around 50 lbs and very puppyish, such a sweet girl but we had to keep our eyes on her all the time, basically the only thing any of us could do was think!   And since I had my infusion for multiple myeloma yesterday I was wide awake last night from the steroid part of the treatment and  all  I had to do was "assemble" each card,  and that went very well, and I'm thankful to have all my May cards done and ready to post each week.  I am quite pleased with them, such variety.   The challenges are good ones.   So on to our sketch for the first Saturday in May.  I turned the sketch one turn to the left and used a winter set from CTMH "Spruced Up."   This is one of my favorite sets and my vision for this card was to create branches for my bird to sit on and to keep with the oval in the center of the sketch I used 3 pinecones.   The base is a digital printed piece of birch wood that I embossed with an SU forest Folder (?name) For the top banner I separated Merry Christmas and stamped it in Cherry Cobbler.  For the bottom vertical banner I used pieces of bakers twine that matched the cherry cobbler.   So often I have observed birds nests where they have woven pieces of thread, twine and ribbon into the nest.  So I wanted to  kind of capture that look.   To make the pyramid look I used yellow enamels in outline above the chickadee.   It was a fun and challenging sketch.   Thank you stopping in and I along with our entire design team invite you to join us this week and take the sketch challenge and then share it.  Challenges are such a wonderful way to grow in our hobby!.     Smiles to all of you,   Kathy