Welcome to my crafty blog. It’s Sunday, so time for the next in my series looking back through Claritystamp’s new design club – this time with #90, the round tree from April 2014. This is a great stamp and I’ve used it a few times over the years. It works well for creating backgrounds, as well as making it the main image.

I decided to make a masculine birthday card with it, and so stamped it three times onto small squares of card in varying shades of green – I used Distress Oxides in ‘iced spruce’, ‘evergreen bough’ and ‘lucky clover’.

I then used a blending brush to add ink around the edge of each square, before mounting them onto a DL (slimline) card blank.

All I then needed to do was stamp the sentiment along the top of the images, using the ‘evergreen bough’. A very straightforward card to make.

The great thing about using distress oxide inks is that you can easily get a second generation image from the stamp if you just lightly spritz it with water. When I was stamping the trees, I also popped the second image onto a spare piece of card before I cleaned the stamp each time. This gave me a paler set, and I followed the same process of just lightly blending ink around the outer edge of each piece before attaching them to a card blank. I thought this softer version worked well for a sympathy card.

Thanks for dropping in. I’m going to share the birthday card with this week’s challenge at Fusion as their sketch inspired the layout.