Hello crafty friends. Well this week’s Christmas card has posed me a bit of a challenge – as you know it’s Japan month at Clarity Crafts and oriental stamps generally aren’t Christmas themed! But you know I always like to think a bit laterally and I remembered the heron stamp (#125 from Clarity’s Craft Club back in 2017) which I thought would work on a winter themed scene using the ‘riverside mountain’ masks. I’ve combined a few challenges into this one – the colours are from 52 Christmas Card Throwdown and fit beautifully into the pastels theme at The Paper Players. Inkspirational have got a CAS theme, with an optional twist of using stickers, and Peace on Earth always go with ‘anything goes’, which is helpful when your card’s a bit left field!

I started by creating my background on one of Clarity’s small squares of stencil card. I lined up two parts of the ‘riverside mountains’ mask set, sponged a little ‘weathered wood’ Distress Oxide across the top and then stamped the texture stamp across the mountains (it’s #187 from Clarity’s Craft Club in 2022). This is the most brilliant technique for getting the effect of rocky mountainsides and I have to thank my Clarity design team buddy Sonia Goodliff for the inspiration! I removed the two masks and used the opposite part of the bottom one so I could then add the texture stamp across the lower mountain range. I covered over the top range with it’s mask, added a medium sized moon mask and lightly brushed ‘saltwater taffy’ Distress Oxide into the sky, adding it along the lower edge of the card too.

I stamped the heron inot place with black Archival ink and shaded his feathers with pink and grey Polychromo pencils. Now, I really should have stamped him first and masked him off before creating the mountains, but I didn’t think it through properly! Instead, I used a fine white Posca pen to go over the areas where I wanted him to remain white, so you couldn’t see the texture stamp on his feathers.

After running a black Sharpie around the card edges, I added a mount of pink Shenandoah companion paper and attached the topper to a 5×5 card blank. The final touch was one of the ‘celebrations & Christmas’ word stickers that I’d also edged with a Sharpie.

So there’s my Japanese themed Christmas card – bet you didn’t even know there was such a thing…! Actually, neither did I, but interestingly herons represent the cycle of life and death in Japanese culture, so not entirely inappropriate for the Christmas celebration of Christ’s birth – every day’s a school day!