Hello friends & welcome to a look at the fab little stamp set from Clarity‘s January Craft Club. I love this pair of bears – there’s a bit more of an explanation at the end of this post about why they resonated so strongly with me when they arrived a few weeks ago! I decided to work with the layout from Freshly Made Sketches and chose Bonnie’s card from Just Us Girls to CASE, picking up the bear & hugs theme from her design.

I started with a 5×5 piece of Clarity’s stencil card and laid the ‘savannah’ mask set onto it from their 6×6 landscape masks set. I lifted one section at a time from the ground to blend ‘mowed lawn’ & ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxides onto it, then removed the sky masks and brushed ‘speckled egg’ across the clouds mask. I stamped the little row of the trees from the ‘woodland miniatures‘ set twice along the horizon in the ‘rustic wilderness’, using a blending nib to add shade below them. I popped the middle mask back into place and used the top of the single tree to add some bushes.

I then turned to the Darjeeling infusion papers and found one that would give the stamped bears a look of texture in their fur. I added shading to them with a brown Pergaliner pencil and then fussy cut them

Adding Prittstick to the back of the bears made them very easy to attach to the topper and I used the brown pencil to shade the ground under their feet. I just had to add the paw prints as well, together with the sentiment all in ‘potting soil’ Archival ink. I embossed a frame onto a 6×6 card blank with a square embedder, ran a brown Sharpie around the edges of the topper and attached it to the card.

Now, I did mention that these bears resonated with me – and here’s why… I had a brilliant trip with friends last year out to Western Canada, travelling through the Rockies. We had a spare half day in Jasper before catching the train through the mountains so decided to go for a walk around the edge of town. We had not planned to run into a large brown bear coming down the footpath we were heading along, that’s for sure! These photos were taken by my friend over my shoulder (I was unlucky enough to be at the front of our little trio!), while his ever-resourceful wife was busy looking for an escape route (by now we were all walking backwards up the path, as advised in the ‘bear talk’ we’d had in the Visitors’ Centre). She thankfully realised we could scramble up the bank to one side and get between a row of houses, which you won’t be surprised to read is exactly what we did!! It took a little while for our pulse rates to settle, I can tell you, and we weren’t about to hang around for any bear hugs!