Hello crafty friends! I’m back with another of my demo cards from yesterday’s TV shows, this time it’s ClarityCrafts ‘Country Scenes on parchment’ – a different take from the stamped image I blogged yesterday. These were really popular on the shows and virtually sold out! Now I don’t do parchment craft, but you don’t need to have any of Clarity’s Groovi parchment kit to make this card, which I’m going to share it with Festive Friday as it picks up blue, white, embossing & any shape other than rectangle (it’s on a square card) from their inspo list.

I started with the smaller of the two printed images of The Old Water Mill on the parchment and coloured it on the reverse side using the B Pergaliner pencils (these are the blending, or oil-based ones). The image is printed on the front of the parchment, so you don’t lose any of the definition by working on the back. Colouring on parchment can look grainy, so I used a little Dorso oil and a blending nib to smooth out the pigment from the pencils. I also added white to the mill house to keep it a lighter shade after I’d added colour to the background. I then brushed ‘tumbled glass’ and ‘broken china’ Distress Oxides across the back of the parchment to give it shade – the pencil colouring acts as a ‘resist’, as it sits in front of the ink once you turn the parchment over.

On yesterday’s show I used one of the images that had a printed border, but this one doesn’t so I decided to add a frame using a square embedder (thanks to Jane Telford for the tip!) You need a slightly different technique for this than when doing it on cardstock. I put the embedder on the reverse side of the parchment with a little low-tack tape under it, then laid it on a soft crafting mat (not on a hard mat as I would for embossing on card) and ran my ball tool round it to emboss the frame, also working from the back of the parchment. I hope that makes sense! In essence, you work on the same side as you’ve placed the embedder, rather than turning it over as you would for a card. And it worked! I had a nice white embossed border, and could then cut the whole piece out with one of the nested picot square dies to give that lovely edge.

I cut a larger white mat, again using a nested picot square die and attached the parchment to it with clear tape (it doesn’t show as there’s ink on the background, but you could use brads for this step). I added another layer of blue Indian Summer companion paper and attached the whole piece to a 7×7 card blank.

That process sounds a lot more complicated than it was and it made a really nice change to work on parchment for once. I may well be revisiting this set in future…