Good morning crafty friends. I’m back with another card using the new ‘away in a manger’ stamps from ClarityCrafts, this time featuring the ones that didn’t appear on yesterday’s card. I’ve picked up the new theme of Clean & Simple (you know it’s my favourite style!) from Inkspirational, together with their optional twist of ‘inspired by a movie’ – obviously ‘Nativity!’ Festive Friday are celebrating World Cardmaking Day and I’ve lifted bright colours, heat embossing and art/craft equipment (the embedder) from their list. You can no doubt work out why I’m also sharing this one with Happy Little Stampers and Merry Little Christmas!

I started by embedding a frame in the front of a 5×5 card blank, and thought it might be helpful to do a quick refresh on this technique. I used one of Clarity’s square embedders (they come in packs of varying sizes) and attached it to the front of my card using a bit of doubled over low tack tape. I then opened the card to work on the inside, ran a bone folder around the eedge of the embedder to locate it (I find it easiest to start at the card edge and slide the bone folder across to bump up against the plastic square), then sharpened it up with an embossing tool. When you take the embedder off the front, you have a lovely indented frame.

I’d worked out my layout on a piece of scrap paper, as I needed to stamp the two individual sheep first before adding the stable, so they were at the front of the scene. I’d cut masks for all three sheep from Clarity’s mask material, then stamped the standing one first, masked it, added the individual sitting one next to it, masked that and then stamped the manger scene. I masked the little sheep on the left and stamped the background into place using the small square backdrop stamp, having brayered ‘carved pumpkin’ and ‘chipped sapphire’ Distress Oxides onto it and spritzed it with a little water. I coloured the stable & manger with Pergaliner pencils, using grey & cream Polychromos to add shading to the sheep (let’s face it, there’s no way they would have been bright white back in that stable!)

I stamped the star and heat embossed it with WOW’s bright white superfine powder. The final touch was to add the sentiment in black ink

That probably sounds more complicated than it was! The key thing was to work out where to stamp the first to sheep so they were in the right place – everything else flowed from there.