Hello crafty friends and welcome to the start of another week! I hope your Monday hasn’t been too miserable. I thought I’d brighten my day with the latest stencil from Clarity’s Craft Club – the lace flower. I decided to use it without any other embellishments for this birthday card, picking up the colours from The Paper Players. I’m also going to share it with Seize the Birthday, who’ve got ‘CAS’ as their optional twist this time, and with Happy Little Stampers for their stencil challenge.

I started by attaching the stencil to a piece of white card and then ran it through my embossing machine. This helpfully makes the image slightly raised, so it doesn’t look so flat when finished – you can just about see it on this photo.

I kept the stencil in place and sponged Distress Oxides in ‘rustic wilderness’, ‘villainous potion’ and ‘ripe persimmon’ through it. I had a problem, though, when I took the stencil off – I’d offset it towards the left hand side of the card and so the right hand edge of the stencil had embossed a crease down the card! You can just about see it in this pic, but it was much more obvious in real life!! I was so cross!

After a quick rethink, I trimmed the offending crease off the card, mounted the narrowed topper onto a layer of green and then attached it to a 5×7 card blank.

I just added one of Julie Hickey’s vertical sentiments onto the card front to finish.

I’ve had a fairly productive day, helped by the fact that the sun came out mid-morning which always makes the world feel better! See you again tomorrow.