Hello friends. I decided to play today with one of my favourite stencils, which I haven’t used for quite a while – welcome to ClarityCrafts‘ ‘woodland birds‘. I fired it into action inspired by a couple of this week’s challenges – Just Add Ink and Just Us Girls – both of which have stencils as their theme. As you read on, you’ll see that I also used the stencil to emboss my card, so I’m going to share it with Can You Handle The Pressure, for their ‘anything goes’ theme.

The stencil is A5 sized and I wanted to make a square card so there were a couple of choices, either to use a larger piece of card and then cut it down having decided which part you want, or cut your card first and fix it to the part of the stencil you want. I went with the latter option, taping a square of card to the upper part of the stencil and ran it through my embossing machine with a shim. This process embeds the stencil into the card so the pattern is debossed, however I wanted the birds and tree to stand out from the card so lifted the stencil off, turned the card and stencil over and reattached them together (you have to line them up carefully, as the stencil won’t now slot into the card and sits on top of the embossed pattern). I could then use stencil brushes to blend ink into the recessed background, using ‘broken china’ and ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxides – it looks like there are three colours as I blended the blue down over the top two thirds and the green up across the bottom two thirds, giving a lovely ombre overlap.

I wanted to leave the stencilled topper as the star of the show, so simply ran a black Sharpie around the edges, embossed a frame on a 6×6 card blank with a square embedder, attached the topper and finished with a Pinky Gray greetings sticker.

Goodness, that feels like a fairly involved post for a pretty simple card – thanks for sticking thrugh to the end!