Hello crafty friends – it’s Friday already and the weekend’s just around the corner! It’s also Valentine’s Day today and all these hearts and love themes have been the perfect reason to add to my stash of wedding cards, ready for the summer season! Clarity‘s Half Price Members’ Sale is still going strong (it runs until midnight on Monday) and I dipped back into their products for the ‘dove heart‘ stencil, which has always been a favourite of mine. I’ve managed to combine a few current challenges for this card too, starting with the palette from Creative Colour and the middle row of stencil/die cut/frame from TicTacToe‘s grid. The birds here also work for Triple B and the pink fits Stencil Fun‘s optional theme.

So, here’s the lowdown on what I did. My first step was to emboss the stencil into a piece of Clarity’s 7×7 stencil card by running it through my Gemini using a rubber shim. Keeping the stencil in place, I could then brush Distress Oxides through it to colour the background – working from the bottom up I went with ‘saltwater taffy’, ‘picked raspberry’ and ‘kitsch flamingo’.

Rather than searching for a co-ordinating paper for the mount, I decided to create my own, blending the three ink colours around the edge of another square of card in the same order as I’d used them on the stencil.

I cut down the stencilled card using one of the ‘hearts‘ doodle frame-it panel dies, then added my mount and attached it to a 7×7 card blank. I found a suitable sentiment in the Pinky Gray word stickers, which I edged with a black Sharpie before sticking it into place.

I love the combination of these sugary pinks and embossing the stencil really adds depth to the image.