Hello there and I hope you’re having a good weekend. I’ve dropped by with another of my samples from Friday’s Clarity Social TV shows, this time it’s the butterfly tree stamp, which comes with a matching stencil as well.

Once again I’ve kept it simple, this time going for a blended panel using the colours from Hand Stamped Sentiments and the wings theme from CAS on Friday. My focal sentiment also works for Word Power‘s challenge.

So, let’s start with the panel. I found the closest ink matches I’d got to HSS’s palette and masked off a panel on a square of stencil card using two strips of low tack tape. I started with ‘saltwater taffy’ Distress Oxide at the top, then moved to ‘evergreen bough’ further down, being careful not to go right to the edge of the card – Clarity’s stencil brushes give a lovely ‘air brushed’ effect. Finally, I brushed ‘bundled sage’ into the centre of the panel, blending it into the two colours above and below.

I then inked up the butterfly tree with a combination of black Archival and Versafine Clair inks to give me a lovely deep black and planted it along the edge of the panel. You can no doubt see the issue I then had – I’d managed to get ink on my fingers & had two smudges on the card. What to do…?!

Well, I decided it was rescuable, first because the smudge on the white strip was where I wanted to stamp my sentiment from Clarity’s Quotes Set 1 so that was easily dealt with. the second one was a bit more tricky as it was in the middle of my inked panel, but I resorted to the little trio of birds from the Just Woodland & Birds set! Having managed all that, I carefully ran a black Sharpie around the edges of the topper, attached it to a 6×6 card blank and drew a sigh of relief!

I do love a bit of ink blending – I could happily do that on all my cards but no doubt we’d all soon get bored!