Hello everyone! I hope you had a lovely Christmas Day, however you celebrate it. Once again, I’ve decided to work through this year’s Clarity Craft Club stamps over the 12 days of Christmas, starting here with #195 the ‘love is all you need border’ set from January. I’m still feeling festive, so decided to use one of the stamps to decorate a Christmas tree (and get a head start on my 2024 cards!) 

I started with the ‘Christmas tree shape’ stencil, attaching it to a square of card then brushing ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxide across it (after masking the star at the top of the tree) and adding shadow to the tree edges by dragging more of the ink onto the card with a sponge. I made sure the ink was fully dry then repeat stamped the little border stamp onto the tree (keeping the stencil in place) and heat embossed it with WOW’s superfine metallic gold powder. The stamp is not as wide as the tree towards the bottom – for those parts I stamped and heat embossed it once from the side, then lined it up to take it across the rest of the tree.

I replaced the stencil to line up the star on the top of the tree, sponged clear ink through it and embossed it with the gold powder. I added ground for the tree by sponging a little ‘walnut stain’ Distress Oxide across a torn piece of copy paper and finished by shading the ‘baubles’ with a red Pergacolour pen (I think they’re really little flowers, but it worked!)

I added a narrow mount of green card, attached it to a 6×6 card blank and finished with the sentiment from the ‘festive round accessories’ stamp set.

There’s a few blog challenges still running, so I’m going to share this with Christmas Craft Creations for their ‘decorations’ theme, with Just Add Ink for their traditional Christmas colours and with Simply Clean & Simple (I included their option of using red & green). See you tomorrow for day 2 of this Christmas trip!