Hello crafty friends. My goodies from the May Clarity Craft Club dropped through the door last week and I realised at that point that April’s stamp still hadn’t seen ink, so now was the time to rectify that! I’ve kept it CAS (clean & simple) on this one (you know it’s my favourite style!), picking up the birthday themes at Addicted to CAS and AAA Birthday, plus the bright palette from Creative Colour Challenges.

Taking one of Clarity’s 3.5″ squares of stencil card, I used a small embedder to emboss a frame around the edges and then stamped one of the occasions – happy birthday sentiments in ‘cobalt’ Archival ink. This is where a 4×4 mega mount came in handy – I could line up the sentiment along the central horizontal line on the mount and then used the etched outer lines to sit it square over the card.

I then set about inking up one half of the floral round stamp, adding ‘carved pumpkin’ and ‘candied apple’ Distress Oxides with sponges. I wanted to pick out the small leaves in the dark blue but the sponge covered too big and area, so instead I used a cotton bud to pick up ‘chipped sapphire’ and dab it onto the two leaves. Once the stamp was fully inked I planted it above the sentiment, then repeated the process, turned the card round and stamped it again at the bottom to complete the circle.

I used the next size up square embedder to emboss another frame onto the front of a 6×6 card blank, then simply added a dark blue mount to my topper and attached it to the card front.

These colours make the flowers look more summery than spring-like – and it’s just occurred to me that using red & greens would also work for a Christmas card! One for my planning list…!