Hello crafty friends. I know it’s a bit early (as it’s nowhere near spring yet…) but I decided to make a birthday card with the daffodil spray set from Claritystamp. The colour palette on this week’s CAS Colours and Sketches challenge seemed perfect for it

I started with Clarity’s ‘ocean swirl’ mixed texture A5 background stamp. I inked it up with ‘golden turmeric’ and ‘mellow green’ Artistry inks, spreading the ink across the stamp with a brayer. I stamped it off once, then spritzed the stamp with a little water and stamped a second image with the residual ink. Looking at them both, I decided to go with the second generation one (on the left of the photo) as it was lighter.

I stamped the daffodil spray onto the background card using ‘watering can’ Archival ink.

I then lined up the co-ordinating stencil to sit on the image and coloured the flowers and leaves using sponges. I used the ‘mellow green’ for the leaves, with ‘golden turmeric’ and ‘cranberry’ Adirondack for the flowers. Some of the flowers are tightly spaced on the stencil and I got a bit of the red ink in other areas, so added a bit more of it to the yellow flowers as shading.

I finished by stamping the sentiment from Julie Hickey’s ‘birthday messages’ set onto one of her banner die cuts in the ‘mellow green’ and attaching it across the bottom of the flowers. The whole piece then went onto a 5×7 card blank.

I’m rather pleased with how this turned out. I usually use the infill stamps on these floral spray images form Clarity, but I can see the stencils will be making more appearances.