What’s a Christmas card doing here in February? Well, I started the New Year aiming to make one Christmas card each week to build up my stash and pretty much failed on that last month, so I figured I’d better get my bum in gear and make a start! With all the hearts around at the moment for Valentine’s Day, this little pair from ClarityCrafts‘ ‘family of penguins’ totally fitted the vibe so out they came to play, along with the ‘sentiment rounds’ & ‘festive round accessories’ sets. Does it seem a bit OTT to use three stamp sets on such a simple card…?!

Anyway, I started by stamping the penguin pair onto a small square of stencil card using black Versafine Clair ink and coloured their little hearts red. I picked up a good tip from Barbara on this (which I think she got from Dee on the Clarity design team!) – if you lay down an undercoat of pencil colour (I used a red Pergaliner), you can then go over the top of it with a Pergacolour pen and the ink won’t bleed on the card. So that’s what I did! I stamped one of the ‘sentiment rounds’ above the penguins with ‘red geranium’ Archival ink, together with the bottom part of the sentiment from the ‘festive round’ set in black (just masking off the top part of the stamp with tape before i inked it). A torn piece of paper and black ink on a sponge gave them some ground to stand on.

I finished with a mount of red card, then created a frame on a 6×6 card blank with a square embedder before attaching the topper.

Simples! We’ve got a big penguin fan in the family, who’ll be getting this in their Christmas post! Before then, I’m going to share it with the challenges at Peace on Earth and Addicted to CAS