Welcome to my crafty blog. Here’s another card using a stamp I’ve had in my stash for a few years – it’s part of the ‘funky foliage’ set from Claritystamp. I love the design, which has echoes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The layout was inspired by this week’s sketch over at Freshly Made Sketches – thank you also to the FMS team (especially Judy) for choosing my post from last week (Our thoughts are with you) as one of the top picks.

Back to this week’s sketch, and I decided that this was a great opportunity to use up some of the scrap paper pieces I’ve got in my stash. I had an off-cut of Claritystamp’s ‘Antarctica’ designer paper that was about the right size, and so cut it into three strips and attached them to a piece of white card that I’d trimmed down to fit on a 5×7 card blank. The Clarity papers are double sided, so I used the darker side for the bottom strip, and then flipped the paper for the top two pieces, to give a contrast.

Next step was to stamp the funky foliage in black Archival ink. I used my stamping platform for this, so I could go over it a couple of times as the card surface was now uneven with the strips of paper. Even so, I couldn’t get the image clearly inked between the strips.

I remedied that by filling in the rest of the image using a black Sharpie pen, and then highlighted the centre of the leaves and flowers with Spectrum Noir pencils in co-ordinating shades.

I finished by attaching the topper to the card blank. I haven’t put a sentiment on it yet, although there is space for one – I can decide when I come to use it.