Hello friends, I hope you are healthy and managing to keep the hope up. Being creative helps for me and if you find yourself struggling to sit down and create, try to do something simple. Make some backgrounds, stamp images and color in, or follow a tutorial. At the moment, I am busy finishing a project that I started with no plan at all, just adding things as I go along. In this post I will share a tutorial for a steampunk bird, with fun techniques working with foil tape, embossing folders, acrylic paint and embossing powders. Use them all, or focus on just one of the techniques. At the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog we have a Steampunk theme this week. Don't miss the inspiration by our March guest designer Ann Chuang. I have had fun creating with Tim Holtz Patchwork Bird die. It is a perfect die for trying out different techniques on since it consists of many pieces. I am enjoying thinking out ways to use it and combining textures. This is my third patchwork bird. The first one was mainly made from fabric and was called Winter Bird and the second one was mainly done by using background stamps: Mixed Media Patchwork Bird. You can use the techniques with other dies and embossing folders too, or turn the project into a card instead. Start by covering a tag with foil tape, or cover a piece of cardstock and then die cut a tag. Emboss it in Tim's Foundry 3-D texture fade. Paint with Distress Paints and then mist pretty heavily with water. Leave to dry. You've got to be patient because this step takes time. When the paint is almost completely dry, wipe it off in some areas. You can wipe more paint off if you want to, but I was aiming for a look where not much of the original metal was showing. Add a piece of Design Tape and a ruler from Tim's Junk Drawer. Die cut the base of the bird from mat board, the body, feet and two wings from Cracked Leather cardstock and the head and the stomach from heavystock cardstock and the rest of the pieces from paper covered with foil tape. I die cut a second wing and some extra tail-feathers, not shown here. Emboss the metallic pieces in various embossing folders. I used Crackle 3-D, Dot-Matrix and Gridlock. Paint with Distress Paint. Mist with water. When almost dry, wipe off some of the paint. Ink the cracked leather cardstock pieces with Distress Ink. I forgot to take photos of the two heat embossed pieces. The head was embossed with Ranger's Sea Mixed Media powder. The stomach was embossed with several layers of the new Fired Brick Distress Embossing Glace. In the final layer, I dropped in some Sea powder to create speckles. Be careful when heat embossing and never touch the melted powder until it is completely dry. Glue the pieces to the mat board base bird. Die cut a piece of black paper for the eye and add a dot of Glossy Accents to the eye. Leo had a look at my earlier stamped Mixed Media Patchwork bird and this steampunk one, and liked the former better. 'Since it is a real bird, this one is a robot bird, it is not real'. Pretty funny, and a robot bird is of course also a great steampunk bird. Hats are common steampunk elements and I simply cut one from black metallic cardstock and sanded it slightly. I also painted three gears and glued to the bird. Here you can also see how shiny the Distress Embossing Glace is. And a painted game spinner was added to the wings. The tail feathers are my favorite part of the Patchwork Bird and it is fun to mix textures and colors. A couple of pieces from Tim's cool Junk Drawer Baseboards set were added to the tag, such as this game piece. Ink the edges and add a bit of black paint to them to distress them. Here's another Junk Drawer piece. By misting the paint with water, it blends and gets a mottled appearance on the embossed foil tape background. Add some twine and then adhere the bird with foam dots for dimension. I wanted to finish the post with this quote from Emily Dickinson. The importance of focusing on hope in hard times. You can find the full poem here. I hope you will join us this week in our Steampunk challenge. As always, you have a chance to win a $50 gift voucher to do some fun shopping at Simon Says Stamp. You have until next Monday 8am Ohio time. 1pm UK time, 2 pm CET to join in. Don't forget to follow Simon Says Stamp on Instagram, they post great stuff daily. Do you use Instagram? If so please add #sssmchallenge so we can see your entries there too. Thank you so much for taking the time to visit my blog today! Stay safe! Happy crafting! Anna-Karin Supplies: * Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.