Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card uses one of Claritystamp’s three way overlay sets – this one is ‘hare in the meadow’. These are such useful stamps – the first one stamps the line art, the second fills in the image and the third colours the background. I like to mix them up a bit using different combinations of the three but today decided to go for the full house.

This hare is ideal today for a couple of reasons. Apparently they are usual nocturnal, but become active during the day in spring when they are mating – I discovered that it’s their spring courtship rituals that gave rise to the English phrase ‘as mad as a March hare’! Perfect timing, then. Additionally, this week’s theme over at The Paper Players is ‘animals’, so here he is. I’ll also pop this into the challenge at Less Is More, as their theme is ‘CAS inking’.

I started by stamping the outline stamp in black Archival ink into the centre of a 6×6 card blank

The next step was to add the colour. I used a make-up sponge to put Distress Oxide ink on the different areas of the second stamp – ‘chipped sapphire’ for the bird and the upper edge of the frame, ‘dried marigold’ for the flowers, ‘mowed lawn’ for the leaves & the lower frame edge, and ‘walnut stain’ for the hare. I generally use a stamping platform for this stage, as I find it easier to get the stamp properly into place before it’s inked – I always seem to be fractionally out of line if I try to do it using a stamp mount. Once that was done, I lined up the third stamp and inked it with ‘speckled egg’ and ‘bundled sage’ to fill in the background.

I decided it didn’t need anything else adding to it, other than the sentiment which I stamped in blue to echo the top of the frame.

Thanks for dropping in. I’ll be back tomorrow with another little creation.