Welcome to my crafty blog and a very excited post. Today’s card is the first I’ve ever been asked to contribute to a blog challenge as a guest member of a design team!!

I was absolutely thrilled to be the featured guest stamper chosen last week by the Color Throwdown team, and so this card is my contribution for this week’s challenge, with the colours of aqua, ice blue and pale green. I was so happy when Susie sent me the swatch for this week – they are right in the middle of my favourite colour palette!

So, onto my card. This is quite a simple one layer card – I love the way you can build up a scene with just stamps and ink. I started with Claritystamp’s small square background stamp and dabbed Distress Oxides in ‘broken china’ and ‘speckled egg’ onto it using a sponge. I went round the edge of the frame with the ‘broken china’ and then stamped it into the centre of a 5×5 card blank. I popped the outer part of a moon mask from Clarity into the image, and blended the two blue inks across it (not sure if it’s now a sun or a moon…!)

I then inked up the landscape stamp from Clarity’s April craft club using ‘bundled sage’, and added a little ‘black soot’ ink with a sponge to put some shadow on the image. I then stamped that across the lower part of the background image. To be honest, I think I was a bit heavy handed with the black across the land, but it’s too late now! I also masked off the lower part of the stamped background and brushed the ‘broken china’ through Clarity’s ‘seaweed’ stencil, to give the effect of rippling water.

I finished by adding a couple of birds with the little stamp that was also part of the April craft club set. I love these – they really finish the scene off.

Thanks so much for dropping in. I’ve got some more exciting news to reveal later this week, but before then I’m going to share this card over at CASology as it fits with their theme of ‘outside’, and Fab Friday whose sketch I used for my card layout.