Welcome to my crafty blog. I was delighted to be invited along as guest designer for the new challenge at TicTacToe – one of my favourites to play along with! The new grid is right up my street – I had so many options to choose from, but in the end went with the right hand column of stencil, circle and ink blending. It will also be shared with Seize the Birthday for the ‘anything goes’ part of their challenge.

I went back to the fab new products from Julie Hickey Designs that Hazel Eaton created, starting with the ‘backgrounds #2’ stencil that has a great circle design on it and taking inspiration from one of Julie’s cards. I used a blending brush and Distress Oxides in ‘mowed lawn’ and ‘broken china’ to add the background to a piece of card trimed to fit an A2 card blank. I had to reposition the stencil several times, using low tack tape to mask off the other patterns on it.

I stamped one of the sentiments from Julie’s ‘sweet sentiments’ in black in, mounted the background onto a co-ordinating layer from Clarity’s Companion Papers and attached it to an A6 card blank.

I stamped the large image from ‘Hazel’s dragonfly’ set onto white card, coloured the body with a marker pen and fussy cut it. I stamped the dragonfly again onto a scrap piece of Clarity designer paper, fussy cut the wings and paper pieced them onto the white card. A dab of glue behind the body fixed it to the card front, and I made the wings shimmer with Wink of Stella (although you can’t see it in the photo).

Thanks for dropping in. Do have a look at the other inspiration from the TicTacToe challenge design team and then play along with us – which three aspects of the grid will you choose?