Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card uses one of my all-time favourite stamps, ‘Tina’s floral spray’ from Claritystamp. It’s become my go-to image for lots of occasions – I think I use it at least once a month. I’ve used the colours from the new challenge at Color Throwdown and the layout from Global Design Project – this is the first time I’ve played along with them.

I wanted to make this on a 6×6 card blank with an aperture, so started with a piece of white card that was slightly smaller, and drew a light pencil circle on it as a guideline. I then added a little ‘antique linen’ distress oxide with a brush, to soften the white. Once dry, I stamped the floral spray into place using ‘watering can’ Archival ink.

The next step was to colour the image. The set has infill stamps for the large flowers and leave, but I wanted a more blended effect so decided to use Spectrum Noir pencils instead. I coloured the flowers with pink and yellow, picking up the challenge colours, and then use the Pergamano blending tool to smooth the shading together. I used a dark green for the leaves, and picked out the little flower spray with the yellow pencil.

I then die cut an aperture in the card blank, using nested circle die, together with a frame in kraft card using the same size circle plus the next one up. The image then attached to the inside of the card front (I actually remembered to put the tape on the front of the card, not the back!) and I added the frame around the aperture using glue.

I finished by stamping three of the sentiments from Claritystamp’s ‘essential sentiments’ set and trimmed them onto small strips, before putting them across the frame with foam pads.

I’m really pleased with how the shading on the flower came out. I’d never have attempted this a year ago, but it’s all thanks to colouring tutorials from Barbara Gray in Claritystamp’s SHAC Shack – check out their YouTube channel to find out more.