Well here we are on the final day of my ’12 Days of Clarity’ challenge! Am feeling very chuffed that I made it right through – it seemed like a good idea to keep me occupied over the Christmas period (and stop me eating all the biscuits!) and I’ve really enjoyed it, but it has been quite intense! So today’s card uses the December New Design Club stamp, ‘Winter’. I don’t normally go for stamps like this, so had to give it a bit of thought. I’ve got a few friends & family who have birthdays during December & January, so thought it would work well with the handwriting sentiments to make a wintry card.

I started by trimming down a piece of ‘Antarctica’ designer paper to fit on a long DL card blank. I then stamped ‘winter’ in Adirondack ‘bottle’ ink and heat embossed it with clear powder. I find doing this really brings out the colour when stamps have got fine lines. I then stamped the ‘birthday’ and ‘wishes’ underneath and embossed them with WOW bright white super fine powder. Both these words are part of longer sentiments (happy birthday and best wishes), so I covered the part of the stamp I didn’t want with masking tape before inking it up, and then took the tape off before stamping it. I then filled in the letters on ‘winter’ with a fine white Posca pen, and coloured in the holly leaves with markers pens.

I stamped the tree on the other side of the card, taking it slightly off the page, and again embossed it with the WOW bright white super fine powder. This is another stamp that I’ve had for a few years (from the days when Clarity stamps came mounted on one of their handles). I think it was a pear tree and came with a little partridge stamp, but I couldn’t find it on the website.

I finished by running a black Sharpie pen around the edge of the paper and then attached it to the DL card blank. Another pretty simple card, but I really like the effect against the blue ‘Antarctica’ paper.