Hello crafty friends. Well, as promised, I’ve been playing again with the new ‘all about the girls’ stamp set designed by Hazel Eaton for Julie Hickey Designs. I pushed myself a bit more with this one, inspired by the fabulous demos from Hazel, Julie & the rest of the team. I took the layout from the current challenge at Inspire.Create and incorporated the elements from the top row of TicTacToe‘s grid – sparkle, embossing, any shape die.

I started with one of my inky mop-up backgrounds and trimmed it down to fit a 5×7 card blank. One day I really will remember to write the ink colours on the back of these mop-up pieces so I can easily match them, without having to do a load of guesswork! I managed to work out that this piece had Distress Oxides in ‘dried marigold’ and ‘speckled egg’.

I then used several of the stamps in the set to create the background. I stamped the fern and the definition in ‘speckled egg’, with the circles and the scribbled corners in ‘dried marigold’.

The next step was to stamp the large circle on WOW clear ink onto white card and heat emboss it with their ‘Carnival’ embossing glitter. I coloured the card using the two Distress Oxides and a waterbrush, just doing it roughly so it picked up the style of the background piece, and then die cut it once dry. I managed to take this photo at an angle so you can see the sparkle from the embossing glitter.

I attached the background piece to a 5×7 card blank, and then glued the die cut on top. The final step was to emboss one of the sentiments from Julie Hickey’s ‘birthday messages’ set onto a die cut banner, again with the ‘Carnival’ powder. I then watercoloured the banner using the ‘speckled egg’ and attached it across the centre of the circle.

I’m loving this background effect – it’s not my usual style but I’ll definitely be trying it on more cards. I’ll leave you with another look at the fabulous sparkle on the centre die cut.