A flock of black birds.
Idea
I’ve always like the unusual collective nouns for the animal kingdom. One of my favorites is a murder of crows. “There’s a murder in the neighbor’s yard,” I yelled and Mrs. Wardinkle came running to view the spectacle, only to be disappointed by a bunch of black birds.
That idea alone nearly dictates what the card will look like. The cover, as is often the case, was harder. Ma Wardkinkle starting us watching the Murdoch Mysteries television series, which follows the adventures of a Canadian police detective in the 1890s. I thought I’d borrow a bit from that show for the cover.
I started working on this as the September card but thought it was more appropriate for October.
Design
The birds had to be in a tree. In January 2014, I used a pattern from Chatani as shown below. It attaches to the base with thread and gives a nice tree with four, equal-sized “branches.”
Chatani Tree from January 2014
After doing some sketches with that and a V-fold, I decide to go with the V-fold. It gives more room in front of the tree at the expense of only having shorter branches that point forward. I considered using the more abstract tree shape from Chatani, but it looked a bit clunky in this case, so I went with a more traditional tree shape. I drew the tree, photographed it, then traced it on the computer for cutting by the Silhouette Cameo. I could have cut it by hand, but the machine is easier, and I was worried I may have to make a few trees before I got one that worked.
As usual, the mechanism is as large as possible without sticking outside of the card. To add more depth to the tree, I cut slots in its main fold and added branches going left and right. They don’t stick out very far since as the card closes, they come close to colliding with the base. I also cut a hole in the tree with some owlish eyes peering out of the darkness.
Owl
I cut out copies of three different crow silhouettes and attached them all over the tree, even a few behind it. To add more interest, I added a parallelogram to each side of the tree’s base to lift some fallen branches for more crows to perch upon.
Side view of parallelograms
There is no hand coloring on this card. All the imagery was created from pieces of printed or cut cardstock. From the hats on the cover, to the crows, to the tree, all were cut by the machine from colored cardstock. I’ve done a few cards in this style and like the clean look of it. Most of the Christmas cards are cardstock only, to make them easier to reproduce.
Cover
The cover has printed speech bubbles, and cardstock cut by the Silhouette Cameo, including Detective Murdoch’s Homburg and Constable Crabtree’s hat. The “chalk” outline of the body, which doesn’t show up well in the photo, is the only hand-drawn part of the card.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is an orange piece of Michael’s cardstock, with light blue cardstock layered on both sides for strength, and to change the cover’s color.
- The mechanism and all other pieces were cut from cardstock of various colors using the Silhouette Cameo.