Welcome to my crafty blog. I’m sharing a birthday card I made suing the Claritystamp ‘country animals’ stencil. It’s so nice to be able to get out and about again on my days off. We’re hearing that wildlife has been doing well during lockdown – I had a lovely walk in part of Epping Forest on Friday (although I only saw a squirrel and some ducks – no sign of any of the rest of this cast of characters!)

This is really the story of a card that went through a process of evolution before the final version emerged. I started by putting the stencil over a piece of the Claritystamp ‘Toscana’ designer card, and then used a foam applicator to pounce white acrylic paint through it (I used ‘Snowflake’ by PaperArtsy

that looked nice, but I decided the animals needed some colour on them. I refixed the stencil (after washing the paint off it) and used a make up sponge to apply ink to them. At this point, I had no idea whether ink works on the top of acrylic paint…. Needless to say, it had variable results, and I still wasn’t happy with the effect, especially for the fox and the owl, although the black & white badger looked quite good.

So the stencil went back on again, and I covered all the animals in black ink, which I thought looked a lot better. I added a sentiment in the top right corner, and edged the card with a black Sharpie, before mounting it onto a 5×7 card blank

Thanks for dropping in – I hope you’ve managed to get some time outside in the sunshine.