Jingling Along for a White Christmas

With Thanksgiving in the past now, and December not more than a few days off, one comes to the realization that this is the last Jingle Belles challenge for 2016.  And it's a photo inspiration challenge.

Pretty, pretty, pretty!

And you know what caught my eye?  The eyes on the tree.  What is hiding there?  

Snowy Owls!

I love snowy owls.  I've had the opportunity to see them in captivity at the Raptor Trust and the Philadelphia Zoo, but it's been on my bucket list to see them in real life - in the wild.  The last few winters there have been reports of snowy owl sightings at Island Beach State Park and Long Beach Island here in New Jersey and I've seen pictures posted on Facebook from locals there.  But ideally, I would love to see one in person.  Maybe in 2017.

From a visit to the Raptor Trust in 2012

From a visit to the Raptor Trust in 2012

It just so happens that the day this challenge was posted HWNSNBP brought me what he called a "Friday present".  (This totally was out of the blue - never had a Friday present before or since.)

We have accumulated a nice collection of white owls over the last several years.  Some are ornaments for the tree.  Truth be told, I like all birds, but at Christmas lately, these are my favorite.

So of course you know I had to try a tree full of owls.  I have a set of two tree dies that I thought I could use by dissecting them into layers to make the tree taller so I could use owls that were not too small to cut out and were proportional to the tree.  I'm showing the close-up first, because try as I might I could not get a good picture of this card and all it's sparkle.  

I had these little owl stickers in pastel shades that I thought about using, but wanted to stay true to the inspiration, so I traced a few of them onto white cardstock and added the details in silver and black before fussy cutting them out.  It wasn't really that tedious.  I eliminated all the feet and the ear tufts because snowy owls don't have ear tufts.  

Another reason I chose not to use the stickers (and I tried) was because they did not stick too well to the glitter paper, which brings me to another observation.  I did not realize that glitter paper has a nap to it.  The die that I used has both trees on it and they are facing in opposite directions and since I cut them up to stack them, you can see the difference in the paper ever so slightly.

Okay, maybe not there so much as here, where the trees are side-by-side.

Okay .............take my word for it, there is a difference.  (Who cropped that picture, Zorro?)

I was on a little bit of a roll and actually put two cards together for this challenge and as I'm usually challenged by time (even more so during the holidays), I'm putting it in this post, but I don't think I can link up more than one card from a post, so here is where it is.

The trees in the background and the rabbit (also a part of that die) are cut from the wood sheets that I found a couple of weeks ago.  It was a challenge for this particular die to get a good cut on that thickness.  I had to do a lot of snipping and cutting to fully release the trees.  But as luck would have it, not one branch broke off.

So why don't you join me in visiting the Jingle Belles to see how the others were inspired by this photo?  Click here.

Oh, and I saw that the inspiration for Our Beautiful World this week is ~White~ so I'd like to add a photo from this post to that blog also.  You have to go take a look at the pictures of "white" from around the world.  Go ahead - get inspired!