This was mainly an experiment using paper blocking techniques. The Papers are from My Mind's Eye Wild Asparagus Collection.

Jaine had made one of these flowers last week when I was there. She made hers from distressed book pages. I decided to try and coordinate with the Wild Asparagus papers. I cut 10 of the smallest Spellbinders Petite Scalloped Circles, squeezed them together using a faux washer and brad on the top and fanned them out to give them a bit of volume.

I'm not really that happy with the card, it's too unbalanced. Unfortunately I kept trying to fix it as I went along. If I have the time I'll redo the card, but I probably won't have a chance to do that as time is running out before I go to Australia, and it would be a shame to waste those pretty papers.

The little bird (which should have been further south and east) is from a clear Basic Grey stamp set. I stamped the legs on the card and stamped the body in one of the coordinating papers and cut it out and attached it above the legs using foam pads to give it some dimension. Unfortunately I had already stamped Happy Birthday on the left, otherwise I would have repeated this process and done the same on the left. In fact a few of the birds climbing up and down across the top would have been cute. The only thing I could think of to balance the bird was to cut out another of the flowers which was on the background and place it on foam pads to give it a bit of dimension. This made the card far too top heavy. The small "Laugh, Live, Love" stamp - an attempt to balance the top heavy card (not nearly enough though) was from the Circles stamp set from Kaiser scrapbook. I did try to peal off the little mosaic centrepiece so I could try repositioning it further down the page but it started to tear the backing paper underneath - trust me to attach it too darn well.

Any simple ideas (which I might have in my stash) to balance the card would be appreciated.