Welcome to my crafty blog. I’ve been playing with the January Craft Club stamp (#171) from Claritystamp, which is a lovely little mandala. I decided to go for a stamped and embossed design, using the colours from this week’s challenge over at Just Add Ink

I started with a piece of stencil card and blended the four colours across it with a brush. I used ‘picked raspberry’, ‘speckled egg’, ‘chipped sapphire’ and ‘mowed lawn’, and then cut the card down to fit onto a 6×6 card blank.

I then stamped the outer ring of the mandala into the centre and the four corners using a WOW embossing ink pad, and heat embossed them with bright white super fine powder. The green looked quite bright at this point, so I toned it down to more of a jade shade by blending some ‘peacock feathers’ distress ink across it. Once done, I layered the card topper onto a piece of navy card.

I layered a narrow strip of white card onto a piece of navy and then attached it across the lower right hand corner, trimming the edges to sit flush with the topper. I then stamped the little sentiment from the craft club set and mounted the whole piece onto a card blank. I finished by adding a few little gems in the background colours.

I’ve made a couple of cards with mandalas recently – they’ve become very popular in the UK and I decided to find out a bit more about them. I knew they came from Hindu and Buddhist culture, but now know that the circular shape represents the universe. Quite appropriate for our times, with major concerns about the human impact of climate change and global pandemics.