Hello everyone – I hope your weekend is going well. I’ve got a bit of a throwback with today’s card, as I’m using up another of the watercolour backgrounds we created at ClarityCrafts‘ summer retreat last year. As usual, I failed to write the colours on the back of this piece but, having compared it with my ink pads, I think it might be ‘peacock feathers’, ‘lucky clover’ & ‘wilted violet’ Distress Inks (possibly…!) The colours work perfectly for the palette at Color Throwdown, together with AAA Birthday‘s background focus theme.

We spent a whole afternoon on the retreat using different techniques to create backgrounds – this one involved brushing inks onto wet watercolour card, then adding interest with the side of an old credit card for the plants and embossing ball tools to dot more ink for the flowers.

I’ve kept it very simple (my favourite style!) and just added the two little butterflies from the KISS ‘just for you flowers’ stamps, shading them with a Pergaliner pencil and stamping the sentiment from ‘Jayne’s bijou framer’ in ‘watering can’ Archival ink. I added a mount of Waimea Falls companion paper and was going to attach the topper to a 6×6 card blank. For once, I didn’t like the dimensions of the topper on the square card, so used a paper guillotine to chop the card blank down along the side, then glued the topper in place.

I’m very happy about getting another background used up from my stash – but there’s still a long way to go with the pile I’ve accumulated!