Hello crafty friends! Well, the new Japanese crane stamps from Clarity were very popular yesterday and busily flying out of the door! After yesterday’s dramatic red & black scene, I’ve gone for something softer today using our new colour palette at CAS Colours & Sketches. Joanne has given us a really interesting mix of colours – these are not the tones I’d usually go for, but it’s always good to push yourself and I think this little scene really works!

I cut myself a 4.25″ (10.8cm) square of Clarity’s stencil card and simply stamped one of the crane infills in ‘gathered twigs’ Distress Oxide – I sponged the ink onto the stamp so it didn’t look too ‘blistery’. Japan month may be over at Clarity but the ‘flowers & butterflies sampler’ set was still waiting to be put away (along with a lot of other stuff…!) and I thought the little waterlilies would work with the crane. I went with ‘dusty concord’ Distress Oxide for the flowers (the nearest I could find in my stash to ‘moody mauve’), adding the leaves in ‘villainous potion’

Now I reached for to of my favourite products – they probably won’t be a surprise to you! I used the small clouds mask from the build-a-scene landscapes and lightly brushed the ‘dusty concord’ across it for my sky – I find the best way with this mask is not to brush right across it, as then you get your clouds in stripes, but instead to just do a little area at a time, and keep moving the mask around. Once done, I added a mount of Indian Summer companion paper. The final step was my other favourite – I used a square embedder to emboss a frame on the front of a 5×5 card blank before nesting my crane topper into it.

So what do you think of with these colours? There’s lots more inspiration from the team over on the CAS Colours & Sketches blog and we’d love to see you in our gallery!