Hello crafty friends. Well, it’s Sunday so time for another lookback into Claritystamp’s monthly craft club, and this time it’s to December 2018 for the ‘cuckoo clock’ (and cuckoo!). This is the end of a chapter really – I’d broken my shoulder a few months earlier and so hadn’t been doing much crafting. I’d got such a backlog of unused stamps (is it just me…?) that I took a break from the craft club in 2019 until I’d got back into the swing of things. It won’t surprise you therefore to discover that this was the first time this stamp had been out of it’s packet!

I stamped the clock onto a piece of white card, shaded it using Pergaliner pencils, and then fussy cut it.

I cut the ‘treescape’ die in green card, mounted it on a piece of ‘Amazonia’ designer card (I’d remembered to put ‘Stick It’ adhesive layer on the back of the green card before cutting) and attached to a 6×6 card blank.

I positioned the cuckoo clock on the card front using foam pads. I then stamped the little cuckoo from the set, coloured her in (female European cuckoos are brown), then fussy cut her and sat her on one of the tree branches.

I finished with an appropriate word sticker, which I mounted on a layer of the green card before attaching to the card front.

Although this was a December stamp from Clarity, it feels very appropriate for now as cuckoos start to arrive in the UK from late March – in fact the call of the cuckoo is supposed to be the first sign of spring. I’m going to share this card as a second offering over at this week’s TicTacToe challenge, as it picks up the elements on the top row of their grid: bird, trees & green.