Welcome to my crafty blog. I’ve just got some new Christmas Robins stamps from Claritystamp, so had to get them out to play with! They are a fab set of scrolled designs, with outlines and infill stamps for the robins. I love robins at Christmas, and it got me thinking about why they have such a strong association for us and are so often on Christmas cards. According to the Scottish Wildlife Trust, it goes back to Victorian times, where the tradition of sending Christmas cards started. Royal Mail postmen, who wore bright red uniforms, delivered these cards. This earned them the nickname of ‘robin’ or ‘redbreast’. Artists usually illustrated Christmas cards with pictures relating to the delivery of letters, such as post-boxes or the postmen known as ‘robins’, and eventually started drawing the familiar little brown and red bird delivering letters instead of the postmen. This trend caught on and is still going strong.

Anyway, back to the card – the design is inspired by this week’s Freshly Made Sketches challenge

I started with the Claritystamp New Design Club stamp for October which is a square of holly & ivy leaves. I repeat stamped down the edge of an A6 card blank to pick up the line in the sketch, using Artistry Ink in ‘Avocado’. I initially had put a line of masking tape down the card, but didn’t like the solid line that gave to the edge of the leaves, so redid it freehand, lining up the stamp so the leaves weren’t cut off.

I stamped the robin outline onto the card in ‘watering can’ Archival ink, and then overstamped with the infill stamp to colour him in. I did this in two stages – initially inking in ‘fired brick’ Distress ink and carefully wiping the red off the little holly leaves before stamping. I then stamped again having just inked the leaves in the ‘avocado’ ink. This would have been so much harder without my stamping platform to keep the stamp & card fully lined up.

I finished by stamping the sentiment in the ‘watering can’, and added red Stickles sparkly glue to the berries to lift them out more

It’s a fairly simple one layer card, but that does help when needing to send through the post. I’m going to make a few more of these to add to my Christmas card stash, which is building up nicely.