Hello crafty friends! Well the Gray Friday sale at Clarity Crafts is till on until midnight on Monday, but just to add a bit of spice into the mix Barbara Gray has got her usual first Sunday of the month show tomorrow on Clarity Social TV with a fab new set of stamps! Meet the Nutcracker, based on a favourite Christmas ballet and drawn a while ago as part of the SHAC Facebook sessions (you can catch up on those on YouTube as well!) I’ll share a pic of the full set tomorrow when they’re released (it includes Clara, the Sugar Plum Fairy & the Mouse King), but for now here’s a simple card featuring the star of the show, who’ll also be making an appearance in the gallery at TicTacToe (I took their right hand diagonal of red, free & sparkle).

So here’s a quick run through of what I did. I found a free download online for the sheet music for the overture from Tchaikovsky’s score and printed it onto cream card. I splattered it with ‘festive berries’ ink using a waterbrush, then sprinkled WOW’s ultra high metallic gold powder aross it (heating from underneath the card so I didn’t blow all the powder off!) to give it a lovely sparkle. I covered a 6×6 card blank with a piece of red Rainbow River companion paper and attached the music onto it.

Next was to stamp the Nutcracker outline onto cream card and use the infill stamps that come in the set to ink him in (I used ‘festive berries’ & ‘black soot’ Distress Oxides). I added gold highlights with a Posca pen and then fussy cut him.

All I then needed to do was add a little scrap card onto the reverse of the Nutcracker and glue him to the card front.

I think it’s going to be a cracking show tomorrow (!!) when Barb goes live at 3pm. And don’t forget that everything else I’ve used on this card is in the Gray Friday sale!