The hens they hopped...

An old traditional childrens song has been ringing in my head since I bought a Mary Vogel Lozinac -sheet from VivaLasVegaStamps. The words are approximately

Granny took her little hens to the meadow

The bitsy little hens they hopped around

I remember singing this with my father, fingers hopping and jumping everywhere and repeating it over and over again waiting for the moment when he'd lower his voice and continue with the next verse where a sly, quiet, long tailed fox sneaks in the forest licking his lips... It was so scary and exciting! (And of course special "lucky" time spent with dad :)

The ringing in my head ended up in this card that I am posting for the VivaLasVegaStamps March challenge (a striped bird), the SimonSaysStamp Wednesday challenge (Anything goes) and the Unrulypaperarts readers challenge (I should be so lucky + shades of green).

The lovely inspiration board for the VLVS March challenge suggests among other things a green/white/black colour combination, birds, stripes, splatters and triangles. I really wanted to use the song for my challenge project and started by taking out my typewriter. I wanted to create stripes with the text, and I wanted to place the text a bit randomly... without realizing that my wishes were a bit contradictory I set to work, and I'll admit I was not satisfied with the result: it was a mess!

I had planned on a CAS look without layers, but looking at the muddle of words I decided to cover it with a green inky underpaper and do stamping and fussy cutting on a separate piece of card. Soon I realized that I didn't have to cover all of the card base: stripes of underpaper would calm down the background in a nice way leaving text stripes in between.

I don't have the VLVS writing triangles, but going with the song theme I decided to make my own using their music background. I masked of some triangles on white satin finished card with washi tape before stamping my birds and the music background with Versafine Onyx Black and heat embossed with VLVS Ultra High Gloss Embossing Powder (love it!).

I doodled around the triangles with an embossing pen and added black Zing embossing powder. I like how the sprinkles of embossing powder stuck around where there was some stickiness left from the heated washi tape. Another unexpected and interesting effect was the spreading of the Versafine ink under the clear embossing powder when I reheated the paper to melt the black doodling.

This far everything went well... and then I was left with the decision of what triangles and birds to place on the card... The beautiful hen or the cute little "chick" or both of them... I don't remember when I've last stared at a card for this long, trying out different combinations!  I like the fact that (despite the layers) this does have a CAS feeling to it!

Now I have a couple of triangles and little crow chicks left. I've never seen anyone posting several times for the VLVS challenge, so I guess I'll make something else out of them :)