Welcome to my crafty blog. Here’s the next installment in my Sunday series of working back through all my Claritystamp New Design Club stamps, this time with #76 the Celtic Square from February 2013.

I’m trying to use up some of the offcuts I have of the Clarity designer papers as well, and so started with a strip of the ‘Barb’s favourite indian summer’ paper that was sitting in my folder. I dusted it over with an antistatic pad, and then stamped the square in black Archival before heat embossing it with clear powder. I did that twice more so I had 3 squares – using the clear powder makes the black stand out more against the backing paper and leaves it looking like a stained glass frame.

I then trimmed each square down, leaving a narrow border of the paper. Before going any further, I stamped the sentiment from the Clarity ‘Art Nouveau’ set onto the lower half of a slimline DL card blank, again using black Archival and heat embossing with the clear powder. I always struggle to get things lined up completely straight on a card (and knew it would look really obvious with the squares if they were out of line), so ran a couple of strips of masking tape down each side of the card. I could then easily line up each square into the gap between the tape, so they were aligned.

I finished by drawing a narrow border around the images using a micron pen and a ruler, to pull the squares together on the card front.

Thanks for dropping in. We’ve had a light dusting of snow today (doesn’t happen very often on the edge of London), so it was a good excuse to stay in and craft!

I’m also going to share this card over at the Less Is More challenge, where the theme is ‘in a row’ – I think this design definitely fits that!