Hello crafty friends. Having shared a card using the ‘birch trees’ stamps from ClarityCrafts yesterday, I’m back today with the partner ‘bamboo’ set. You can get both of these on a ‘buy one, get one free’ offer this week – check it out here. The palette at this week’s Color Throwdown was just perfect for the bamboo card, I thought, and I’ve based the layout on Atlantic Hearts sketch.

First step was to stamp the small backdrop circle onto stencil card. I blended ‘worn lipstick’ and ‘mustard seed’ Distress Inks onto the stamp with a brayer – I put the ink directly onto the stamp this time and then brayered it out, but you can see it’s a bit speckled as both ink pads are quite juicy. I decided I quite liked the texture on it thought, but I’d have got a more even blend if I’d picked up the ink with the brayer from a blending mat. I stamped the outline bamboo stems across the circle with ‘potting soil’, then shaded them with Pergaliner pencils. I picked a pale terracotta, light brown and yellow (all B pencils) and blended them across the stems – undercoat with the pale terracotta, shading with the light brown and then yellow over the top. I also used the light brown to colour the leaves.

There’s a little bow on the AHSC sketch, as I added one of the separate leaf stems to the side, together with an approriate ‘bijou Japanese symbols’, again in the ‘potting soil’. A quick mount of kraft card and it then sat nicely on a 6×6 card blank (don’t faint, but I haven’t used an embedder!!)

I do love both these stamp sets – if you haven’t got them in your stash, then it’s definitely worth grabbing them this week!