Hello crafty friends and welcome to our new challenge at CAS Colours & Sketches where Laura has given this fab trio of tones. I reached back for Clarity’s Elementree stamp set for this one – they weren’t far from my craft desk as I’ll be demoing with them at Clarity’s Open Days in Kent at the end of this week!

I’ve pulled two current challenges into this card, using the layout from The Paper Players and the ‘birthday’ theme from Addicted to Stamps & More.

Now, you may have noticed that I love a bit of ink blending, so I went for it again with these stamps. I used sponges to blend ‘lucky clover’, ‘blueprint sketch’ and ‘wilted violet’ Distress Oxides onto one of the leaves from Elementree set 2 and stamped it three times on a small square of stencil card, to reflect The Paper Players’ sketch.

You may have spotted that I also love using Clarity’s embedders to emboss frames onto my cards and I thought I’d just take a minute to refresh the technique for you too. I used one of the square nested embedders on this 6×6 card blank as it was the right size to frame my topper (as good a reason as any!) I used low tack tape to hold the embedder on the front of the card, then turned to the inside to emboss it. I was previously using a bone folder to initially locate the embedder, but have now discovered that the base of the new stamp pens works really well – they are angled so it’s easy to run them around the embedder to make the initial crease, before sharpening it up with a #2 embossing tool.

Having got my embedded frame, I used a ruler and a bright blue Sharpie to edge my leafy topper, then sponged a little of the ‘lucky clover’ across torn copy paper to ground my ‘trees’.  I attached it to the card front, finishing with one of the new Birthday & Christmas stickers.

We do hope you’ll come and play with our palette at CAS Colours & Sketches – our challenge runs for two weeks so there’s lots of time to plan your creation!