Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card uses the little stamp set from Claritystamp’s February Craft Club. My sister and my craft buddy are both club members as well, so we now get together online at the beginning of each month to craft with the latest club stamps. I love how we can each have the same set of stamps and project ideas sheet, and yet none of our cards are ever the same. That’s the joy of crafting!

So here’s my offering from our crafty session last Saturday. I took inspiration for the colours from this week’s challenge over at TGIF challenges – I thought they worked really well for these stamps

I started by stamping the hummingbird onto a piece of card, and then painted him using Perfect Pearls mica powders in ‘perfect gold’ and ‘forever green’. Mica powders are easy to paint with – you just need a few drops of water mixed with them and a brush! Having used them before, I knew that the stamped image would get a bit lost under the paint, so I’d kept the hummingbird in place on my stamping platform and could then restamp him on top once the paint was dry. I then fussy cut him out, which was a little bit fiddly! The great thing about the mica powders is that they have a pearlescent sheen, so the bird shimmers in the light – you can’t see it in this photo (which isn’t a very good one!) but it is more obvious on the main photo at the top of this blog.

I then used the blossom stamp to create a wreath of flowers. I stamped the full image on a piece of kraft card four times, to almost form a square, and then masked it off apart from the top three flowers which I then stamped into each of the corners (I hope that makes sense!)

Next step was to add some colour. I used a white Pergamano pencil to first colour all the flowers, and then added the purple shade to their centres and outer edges with one of my Spectrum Noir pencils. I coloured the stems green to pick up the other shade in TGIF’s challenge, which matched really well with the colour of the bird’s wings. Once coloured, I fussy cut the wreath around the outer edge.

As I was going to mount it onto a kraft card blank, I thought it would benefit from a bit more definition around the edge, so gently blended some ‘wilted violet’ Distress Oxide around it, before adding the sentiment in the lower left corner.

Finally, the hummingbird needed to hover over the flowers (he was getting a bit thirsty for some nectar), so I popped some Pinflair glue onto him and sat him in the top right of the wreath.

I do like these colours against the kraft card, but it would equally good on white card. Like the hummingbird I’m ready for a drink now, although my choice would be coffee rather than nectar! See you tomorrow with another creation.