Hello crafty friends. The iconic Barbara Gray has been doing new product shows on the first Sunday of the month for over 18 years and tomorrow is no exception! After the success of her online collage workshops last year (which I absolutely loved!), she’s back on Clarity Social TV from 3-5pm tomorrow with a fantastic new set of dies based on her brilliant handcut collages. I’ve got a peek at the countryside set for you today, just to whet your appetite.

Now, Clarity have an ever-growing collection of collage papers, but I decided to test the die out with a piece of their Amazonia designer paper. I cut the landscape die into the paper (it’s a single die that cuts all the sections in one go), then spaced them out so I could shade the edges of each piece using ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxide and a foam ink applicator – these work best if you use them at an angle to the paper, working in a circular motion to catch the edge. Hvaing done all the lower pieces, I edged the sky section with ‘broken china’.

I cut myself a 6×6 piece of stencil card and set about gluing the die cut pieces into place with a Pritt glue stick, butting them up against each other. Once they were all in place, I trimmed the card edges back straight with a guillotine (you can never get the edges lined up perfectly, at least I can’t!) I added a very narrow mount of black card and attached the topper to an 8×8 card blank.

As fabulous as the die cut landscape is, it looked a little empty, so I cut a few cottages from theset in black and white card. These are an inspired design – the black areas cut as a solid backing piece for each cottage and then the white die cut sits on top of it (but you could do these in any colour you want! I finished with a few birds doodled with a micron pen and a Pinky Gray greetings sticker.

There are three die sets in the collection – they would make fantastic collage pictures on a mountboard and I’m pretty sure Barb will be talking about that tomorrow! For now, I’m off to share these in the galleries at Love Those Pretty Papers (for obvious reasons!) and The Four Seasons – their theme is ‘spring’ and I think this looks like a beautiful May morning.