Hello crafty friends. I’m back with a card starring another of the new 8×8 stencils from ClarityCrafts – this time it’s the thin plaid one, which I used to emboss the card rather than blending ink through it.

I failed to take pictures at each stage of this one, but it’s simple enough to talk you through! I started with a piece of card, attached the stencil to it with low tack tape and ran it through my embossing machine using a rubber shim. That gave me a lovely chequerboard pattern as the basis for my lettering. I trimmed the the embossed card down to 8 squares wide & high, added a narrow mount of black card followed by a layer of Antarctica designer paper and attached it to a 7×7 card blank.

I stamped the letterbox alphabet onto offcuts of the Antarctica paper (making sure I had the right letters to spell my words!) and cut them out with the co-ordinating dies. All I then needed to do was glue them onto the individual squares, going for a Scrabble style layout.

This is such a versatile design – you could make it work for any occasion, age or gender just by varying the words and colours, but as this is a birthday card I’m going to share it with Seize the Birthday. Happy days!