Jingle Belles - Creature Feature

Ooooooooh, I'm just barely squeaking this one in.  This is for the Jingle Belles challenge calling for creatures.  I have a tidy selection of suitable stamps but I really wanted to use this one which was a gift from my blogging buddy Sabrina.  It's a Lili of the Valley stamp - my first one - and I absolutely love it.  Those little birds of course had to be bluebirds.  Sabrina knows me very well.

I've been so preoccupied with Halloween projects that I kept putting this on the back burner and finally last night I sat down to get it going.  I didn't quite finish watercoloring the image last night when I ran out of steam so I knew I'd have to get it done first thing home from work today.  Good thing that I had stamped the image twice because I did not like the color I had originally chosen for the scarf and hat - it was blue but much too dark.  So I scoured my ink choices and came up with this Dapper Denim and, not wanting to use red, I decided to make the other stripe Pistachio.  

Of course, when you're on a tight schedule, you should decide to pick out an embossing folder such as I did and choose to highlight all those raised dots with a white gel pen to look like snow.  My hand is twitching as I type!  Yeah, but I like it - so I'll suffer through the twitching tonight.  Funny thing that as I was working in my room on this, I only had the ticking of the little clock that I keep on my table as background noise and then I could actually hear the bluebirds outside at the suet feeder - no lie.  It was quite serendipitous and made me smile.  

You probably cannot tell from the photo but the snowman and the rest of the snow on the image are highlighted with some sparkly clear Wink of Stella.  

I threw (almost literally) the silver elastic bow on mainly to hide the fact that I did not push the embossing folder up high enough and there was an unembossed 1/4" that peeved me.  

Oh yes, and another little bit of serendipity was the package of the pistachio colored doilies on my table that caught my eye as I was gathering my supplies.  Who needs trees in the background when you can have a green doily?  

Well, I see that there is a plethora of creatures to investigate over at the Jingle Belles blog.  Won't you take a peek with me and leave some love!