Hello friends. I’m back with another of my demos from yesterday’s Clarity Social TV – I was using this bird tree stencil on the 2pm show.I decided to go for a colourful rainbow of birds bursting out of the grey tree – a simple technique which works for the challenges at Just Us Girls and Stencil Fun.

The first thing I did after attaching the stencil to a square of card with a low tack tape hinge was to run it through my embossing machine using a shim, which embossed the stencil image into the card giving it a little more definition. I kept the stencil in place and covered the bird section with Post-It notes, so that I could focus on sponging grey shades into the tree – I went with ‘hickory smoke’ and ‘black soot’ Distress Oxides. I dragged the sponges in from the outer edge and dabbed or pounded the colour into the centre (there’s one little bit of the tree stencil that’s likely to move if you push the sponge over it)

I then turned to adding colour to the flock of birds using the shades of the rainbow and spot-on sponges – working from the bottom up I used ‘wilted violet’, ‘chipped sapphire’, ‘blueprint sketch’, ‘mowed lawn’, ‘mustard seed’. ‘carved pumpkin’ & ‘festive berries’. There are one or two bits of the stencil where it’s very fine and difficult to get the sponge in, so I finished those areas with a sharp Pergaliner pencil, just stroking the colour over the embossed image.

I needed a suitable sentiment and (after a bit of searching) found the perfect one in Barbara’s word sticker stamps, which I inked up in the ‘blueprint sketch’ Distress Oxide – I haven’t used these in ages! I trimmed the stencil card down (top tip – start with the edges by the birds so you’ve got their placement right, then cut the tree sides to the right size) and added a mount of Shenandoah companion paper. I used my largest square embedder to emboss a frame onto a 7×7 card blank and attached the topper into it.

I love the sense of movement from these birds soaring out of the tree.