Happy New Year at Love to Craft Challenge

Welcome to 2025! Can you believe we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st Century? I’m clearly getting old! Anyway, enough about that, we’re kicking off the new year with a new challenge at Love to Craft and a bit of a change. As always the theme is ‘anything goes’, but we’ve bid farewell to the brilliant Leslie who set up and ran the challenge, now welcoming Helen who’s taken over as blog owner.

Now I have to confess that life got a bit hectic in the run up to Christmas and I didn’t manage to get cards sent to everyone, so I made a batch of New Year cards to send to those I missed. ClarityCrafts has this great ‘Happy New Year’ stamp and I do love a bit of black & white on kraft card – and my favourite CAS style works for the new year theme at CAS on Friday too.

I started by embossing a frame onto the front of a 6×6 kraft card blank, using one of Clarity’s square embedders. I thought it was probably about time I recapped this process too, so here you go. I attached the embedder to the front of the card blank using doubled over masking tape. Turning to the inside of the card front, I rubbed it with a tumble dryer sheet (it makes the embossing tool glide more easily) and used a bone folder to slide in from the edges, butting it up against the embedder to locate the sides. I could then run a small embossing tool around each side to sharpen the creases, giving me a lovely debossed area to stamp into.

I stamped the main image in black Versafine Clair ink, then heat embossed it with clear powder which always intensifies the black. I added a few of the extra stars from the set around the sides and heat embossed those too. I then usually leave my cards for a while (ideally overnight) as the card gets warped by the heat gun. Once it was flat again, I used a fine white Posca pen to fill in the letters and the centres of the stars.

The final touch was to stipple around the image with the Posca pen.

So I hope this first day of the new year finds you well and ready for more crafting adventures over the next 12 months. Why not make a good start by sharing your creations with us at Love to Craft?!

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