Hello crafty friends. I’m back today with my design team card for the new theme of ‘tropical or beach’ for Sparkles challenge. This card contains something old and something new and is a bit of an arty departure for me – definitely not my usual CAS style! I spent two days last week at ClarityCrafts‘ annual retreat, being inspired by Barbara Gray, and came home with lots buzzing in my head! We had a whole session on making backgrounds and I’ve used one of them today – more of that shortly. As well as Sparkles’ tropical theme, I’ve picked up the top row from TicTacToe‘s grid – stencil, birthday & red.

The starting point for this card was a background piece I made at the Clarity retreat. It just used acrylic paints applied to paper with a brayer – I chopped it down to give me the part I wanted for this card. I decided to use the latest stencil from the Craft Club, which has a great tree design and took inspiration from Dee Paramour’s card on the club project sheet. This involved covering the stencil with ink (‘evergreen bough’ Distress Oxide) using a sponge applicator, spritzing it with water, laying it on the background paper and then running it through my die cutting machine to emboss the ink pattern onto the paper.

I stamped leaves around the tree branches using the small stamp from the ‘birch trees’ set and ‘evergreen bough. I trimmed the paper down to fit a 6×6 card blank, edged it with a black Sharpie using a ruler and then applied a sheet of thin double sided adhesive to fix it to the card. Heading back to Sparkles’ ‘tropical’ theme, I stamped the macaw from Clarity’s Craft Club back in 2020 onto a scrap piece of white card and watercoloured it with Distress Oxides in ‘feative berries’, ‘mowed lawn’ & ‘mermaid lagoon’ before fussy cutting it and attaching to the card front.

There’s so much going on in the landscape on this card that it really didn’t need anything else adding, other than a word sticker to finish.

That macaw definitely fits the ‘tropical’ brief for Sparkles challenge! Come on over and join in with us – we’d love to see your cards in our gallery