Welcome to my crafty blog and another card from last weekend’s shows using ‘Tina’s bijou retro stamps’ from Clarity Crafts. Once again, I’ve got to thank my Clarity team-mate Jane Telford for the inspiration on this one – Jane’s card was very CAS, but for once I decided to step it up a bit with some designer card and a white gel pen.

So, I started with a piece of the Indian Summer card that I cut across into a square. I laid the stripes stencil over it (running low tack tape down each side so the stripes didn’t move) and brushed ‘watering can’ Archival ink across it, sweeping in from the left so I got a soft fade out on the right. I stamped one of the solid trees (or are they leaves?) onto the card, covered it with a mask I’d cut to fit, then stamped the second tree to overlap it.

The card and trees are both quite dark, so I used a white gel pen to pick out the little circles on the stamps as a highlight, adding a row of dots at the base of each tree as well. I added a narrow mount of white paper, then a layer of Northern Lights companion paper and attached it to a 6×6 card blank. A Father’s Day sentiment (from the bijou retro stamps set) fininshed it nicely, although this would work well for a birthday card too.

This is still bascially a CAS design, but the background card gives it a lot more impact and so I’m going to share it at TGIF Challenges as a second offering for their theme.