Welcome to my crafty blog and the next installment in my weekly lookback through Claritystamp’s new design club. Today’s card uses the ‘deer heart’ stamp from December 2014 and takes us into the start of my third year as an NDC member.

I used one of Barbara Gray’s cards on the project sheet as my starting point for this one but stepped it up a little with some of Clarity’s newer products. I started by stamping the deer onto a piece of white card, positioning it so it sat to the bottom right of a circle stencil. I then covered it with Clarity’s precut mask and put the stencil over it, before blending Distress Oxides in ‘pumice stone’, ‘mustard seed’ and ‘ripe persimmon’ across the background.

I then put one of the ‘riverside landscape reflection’ masks under the stencil to the left of the deer, and blended Archival ‘shadow grey’ into the trees using a sponge. Next was to swap the mask on the deer for the outer part, and then blend ‘watering can’ and ‘potting soil’ Archival with a sponge to colour him in.

I finished the card by adding the sentiment, and trimming the topper down to sit on a 6×6 card blank. The final touch was to add a narrow black inner frame cut with one of Julie Hickey’s square layer frame dies.

Thanks for dropping in on another beautiful sunny afternoon here in the UK. This card looks a bit autumnal, but I’m OK with that – maybe it’s an evening sunset in the Scottish highlands. I’m going to share this with a couple of blog challenges (it’s a second offering for both of them!) – I used Just Add Ink‘s sketch again, and the ‘masculine’ theme from As You See It