Welcome to my crafty blog. I’m back in harness now after a week away staying in a Welsh farm cottage with nursing friends – we’ve celebrated 41 years this week since we all first met in London as baby student nurses! We’ve got a new challenge today at Alphabet Challenge and I’m thrilled to be hosting it for the first time! We’re up to the letter L this week, so I’ve chosen ‘leaves’ as the theme, which felt appropriate as we’re starting to move towards autumn.

I went back to the ‘acorns’ stamp from Claritystamp’s new design club in 2015 that I used at the end of last month, as it’s got some lovely oak leaves on it. I also picked up Inspirational Challenges new theme of ‘autumn leaves’, which influenced the colours I’ve used on this one.

I started by die cutting a square in a piece of copy paper to form a mask for the centre of a 6×6 card blank. I then brushed ‘mowed lawn’, ‘fired brick’ and ‘dried marigold’ Distress Inks across it to give me a coloured panel on the card front.

I kept the mask in place and stamped the acorns & leaves across the centre. I then used a waterbrush and piece of kitchen towel to lift some of the ink from the acorns & leaves.

The next step was to use my Spectrum Noir pencils to add colour back into the image – green and yellow for the acorns, and red & green onto the leaves. I then die cut a frame from Clarity’s ‘Amazonia’ paper at attached that to the card.

The final touch was to add the sentiment, again using one of Clarity’s word stickers.

Thanks so much for dropping in – it’s good to be back. This card will be winging it’s way to another friend who has recently retired – I thought the mixture of autumn leaves with acorns for new beginnings was ideal.