Hello, and welcome to my little crafty blog. Thanks for dropping in. I’m sharing a birthday card I made for a friend’s father, which seemed an appropriate image as the UK government has announced this week that some of the lockdown restrictions have been eased. We can now go and meet a friend in a park (although I think these two are probably sitting too close together to comply with the rules!). Fortunately, there’s no sign of anyone else in sight, so they’ll probably get away with it…

I used the Panoramic Vista aperture die from Claritystamp, which is part of a set of 4, and then used a double die cutting technique, which gives a lovely quilted appearance on the finished card. The first thing to do is cut the die out of a piece of the Clarity designer card, and then remove the main image very carefully, so the other pieces all remain in the die. Barbara Gray at Claritystamp calls this ‘trap the scrap’!

Next step involves putting a square piece of double sided adhesive onto the die to capture the pieces left in it, and then peel them out. It’s worth taking a minute to make sure the adhesive acetate is pushed into all the bits of the die before peeling it off.

Then cut the die out again on the front of your card (I used a 7×7 square card for this one). The tricky bit is then lining up the two images, so the pieces on the adhesive acetate slot into the die cut on the front of the card.

You’ll then need to put a piece of white thin card onto the inside front of the card, over the adhesive acetate, otherwise no one will ever be able to open the card!! At this point I though it needed something else to finish it, so I went back to the image cut out of the designer card and cut the outer edge into a frame using a square die

Having framed the image on the larger card, I used the original die cut to make a second smaller card, giving two cards from one piece of the designer card, and then stamped both cards with a sentiment

The weather in the UK is forecast to be warmer again this week, so I hope you get chance to get out into a park or garden at some point. Take care and stay safe