Hello crafty friends. I’m back with a second card, this time for our new challenge at Christmas (or not) BINGO. We’ve got a new bingo card for you to play with – just choose one of the columns and incorporate at least three of the elements in your card (which doesn’t have to be a Christmas one). I’ve gone with column B, picking up enamel dots, frame and clean & simple for this Christmas card using ‘Linda’s Oh little town of Bethlehem’ stamps from ClarityCrafts

The first thing I needed to do was make a mask for the Bethlehem scene stamp using Clarity’s reusable mask material. The easiest way to do this is to stamp the image on a piece of scrap paper, lay the mask material over it and cut round the image. The mask will then store back on it’s piece of carrier sheet. You can’t stamp directly onto the mask material as it’s plasticised, so the ink won’t dry!

The next step was to stamp one of the ‘patterned panels’ onto a square of stencil card and add the Bethlehem scene above it. I then stamped the sentiment into the frame – I find it easiest to stamp the outer words first, and I can then line up ‘of’ in the centre space. I masked the houses and lightly brushed ‘blueprint sketch’ upwards from it to create the sky, before colouring in the buildings with Pergeliner pencils.

I mounted the card onto a layer of navy and attached it to a 6×6 card blank, finishing with three small silver enamel dots for the stars.

My layout was inspired by one of the original Clarity design team cards when these stamps were released, which I stepped up a bit. I’m going to share it with the challenges at Addicted to Stamps and The Holly & Ivy. More importantly, come on over to Christmas (or not) BINGO and play along with us – which column will you choose?