Welcome to my crafty blog and a new letter and theme over at Alphabet challenge. We’re up to K and Billie has chosen ‘kindness’ for this one – our cards need to include the word itself. It’s always exciting to see what my fellow design team members have made, but we love to see your creations as well. I must admit, I had to do quite a bit of digging through my stash for this one, as I don’t seem to have many (if any) sets that actually have the word ‘kindness’ in the sentiments. Luckily, I came across the retired ‘painted harvest’ set from Stampin’ Up! (which you’ll have noticed I’ve used a couple of times recently) which had the perfect sentiment.

I started with the sunflower stamp (it’s a two part one) and stamped it in SU’s ‘pool party’. I don’t actually have any SU ink pads, but I do have a selection of their ‘write’ markers which can be used to ink up stamps as well – incredibly useful. I stamped the flower over a strip of white card, and then added the leaves and centres in navy.

I then mounted the strip onto a piece of ‘night of navy’ card, which I’d cut to fit on a 5×7 card blank. I wanted to add some red dots to the images, using the little dotty stamp from the set, and thought they could look quite effective on top of the petals, as well as scattered between the leaves. Hopefully I haven’t overdone it!

The next step was to heat emboss the sentiment in white onto an offcut of the navy card. I trimmed it down, mounted it on a layer of white and the attached it to the card front with foam pads.

To finish, I stamped a couple of the leaf sprays in navy and cut them out with the co-ordinating punch, before gluing them around the corners of the sentiment.

Do come and join us at Alphabet challenge with your ‘kindness’ cards – remember, you need to feature the actual word on your creations. In the meantime, I’m sharing this card over at two other challenges. I used this week’s Freshly Made Sketches layout – they’re celebrating their 500th challenge this week and it’s lovely to be able to join them. I’ve also used the beautiful colours from this week’s Colour INKspiration challenge over on Facebook – I love these shades.