Welcome to my crafty blog. I’m a bit late posting today as I’ve been getting all the last few things finished for Christmas, but then remembered that I still hadn’t made a card for my father-in-law’s birthday – which is tomorrow! He’ll be 97 and I thought he might like a new jumper courtesy of Clarity’s ‘Christmas jumper’ stamp set. I took my inspiration for the design from the photo at Inspired by

The first step was to stamp the jumper outline onto a square of white card with ‘watering can’ Archival ink. I used the outer part of the pre-cut mask to cover around the stamp, and masked off the sleeves with low tack tape and a sticky note, adding a mask I’d cut for the neckline as well. I used two of the stamps from the set to decorate the body of the jumper in the ‘watering can’.

I then moved the tape and sticky notes to cover the body of the jumper and stamped the pattern onto the sleeves. Once I’d removed all the masks, I coloured the neckline, welt and cuffs with grey alcohol markers.

Now this is where one of those happy crafting accidents occured! I decided to use one of Clarity’s ‘frame-it’ aperture dies around the edge of the white card. I’d cut the card a little smaller than usual, but thought the die just fitted around the edge. After I’d run it through my embossing machine, I realised that it had just gone off the edge on two sides, leaving a spiky border (I don’t know how else to describe it!) I actually thought it looked pretty effective, so trimmed the edge off the other two sides as well. I glued it to a 6×6 dark grey card blank, then ran round the edge of the jumper with the light grey alcohol marker to give a little shadow.

I softened the edge of the shading around the jumper with an alcohol blending pen. I added the sentiment on a die cut banner and finished with a few dark grey Glossies hearts.

I’m going to have to try a few of the other ‘frame-it’ aperture dies to see whether they work with the edge cut off as well (another project for the Christmas holidays!)