A Start on Father's Day

Only God Can Make a Tree!

(But I can try!)

 This card uses Mo's "Bella and Bronte Camping". I think this is such a fun and unusual image! I had to have it when I first saw it because my husband loves camping, as do all my children and grandchildren. Me...not so much! I stay home and make cards while they go off and enjoy the great outdoors. 

As always, I colored the image with Copics and Prismacolor pencils. The DP is from Basic Grey, and the CS is Garden Green and Soft Suede from SU!. The border is a Martha Stewart punch. The striped grosgrain ribbon is a favorite from my stash. The sentiment is a stamp from My Sentiments Exactly.

I had a small, flat, painted wooden tree that I wanted to use as an embellishment, but couldn't find it anywhere, despite tearing through all my stuff! I was at a loss as to what to use instead. I finally settled on trying to make a leafy branch, and this is what I came up with.

I covered some wire in white florist tape, shaped it into a branch, and colored it brown with a Copic marker. (I would have used brown tape if I'd had any, but I had to improvise!) I punched out several small flowers with five pointy leaves in green CS, shaped them a bit with my fingers and a small awl, and glued two together. I glued the clusters onto the branch, and I was done!

It still needed something, so I found this cute owl on a coloring book site, printed him very small, colored and cut him out. He's mounted on the branch using a pop dot.

I thought I had some yellow star buttons, but I came up empty on those, too. I just used my trusty Copics to color some white ones and sewed them on with linen thread.

This may be my husband's Father's Day card. On the inside it will say, " To the man who always makes sure I'm a "happy camper"! That, in fact, is so true! All my friends say I'm terribly spoiled. I just laugh and say, "Yes, I am, aren't I!" 

Just tonight I came home from school with feet that were very swollen from the oppressive heat we're having in NH this week. I went into the living room and sat down in the reclining chair to put my feet up. A few minutes later, he came into the room with a fan and set it up to cool my poor feet (and me!) down. It's things like that that make me realize I made a pretty good choice 44 years ago!