Hello crafty friends. I’ve been having a quick play this evening after another day spent online in a work meeting – it’s so nice to step away from it all and just create something. Barbara Gray from Claritystamp was on The Craft Store today – I’ve just been watching her on catch-up and got inspired to get this lovely ‘trees and their mantles’ stamp set out. Regular readers of this little blog will also know that I love a bit of ink blending as well!

I started with a square of white card and used Clarity’s stencil brushes to brush Distress Oxides in ‘ripe persimmon’ and ‘pumice stone’ across it. I added one of the moon masks (I had brushed a bit of the orange on first!) and then used one of the landscape masks to add a horizon.

I then stamped the grass and tree skeleton onto the card using ‘walnut stain’. I blended the ‘walnut stain’ and ‘ripe persimmon’ onto the tree mantle stamp with a sponge and then added it over the branches.

Very happy so far – it reminds me of the misty autumn mornings we get at this time of year, but I did think the horizon looked a bit too high so I used the landscape mask to add in a couple more hills by just brushing a little more of the ‘pumice stone’ & ‘walnut stain’ across it. That looked much better!

I finished by adding the verse from one of Clarity’s ‘poetry frame’ sets using ‘potting soil’ Archival ink, and then just ran a Sharpie around the edge of the topper before attaching it to a 5×5 card blank.

Thanks for dropping in. I’m going to share this little offering with a couple of the current blog challenges. I used the colour palette from Color Throwdown and teamed it with the theme of ‘down to earth’ from Time Out challenges