Hello friends. I’ve had a busy but fun day today, setting up ready to spend the next two days demonstrating at Clarity’s Open Days in Kent and catching up with my design team buddies. I thought I’d pop in and share one of the designs I’ll be demoing (if anyone wants to see it!) using the winter build a wreath stamps to create this festive swag.

I’ve managed to incorporate a few current blog challenges into this one as well, starting with the palette from Creative Colour. In addition, Inkspirational have got ‘celebrate’ as their theme and it’s ‘anything Christmas goes’ at The Holly & Ivy

I first cut a piece of card to fit on an A6 card blank and drew a couple of pencil guidelines using one of the oval embedders (with hindsight, I’d have got a deeper swag if I’d used a circle embedder but that’s life!) I stamped the little ivy images along the swag using ‘lucky clover’ Distress Oxide, then added in the holly with the same colour but in second generation (ie I stamped it off lightly on copy paper after inking before adding it to the card, which gives a lighter tone). Next was to stamp in the larger poinsettia with ‘villainous potion’, followed by the little ones again in second generation.

I added a little more detail to the swag with one of the berry twigs, appropriately using ‘gathered twigs’, plus one of the little star stamps. I added the sentiment from the occasions – Merry Christmas and a mount of Rainbow River companion paper, then attached it to the A6 card blank.

I am so looking forward to playing with these stamp sets all day tomorrow and catching up with lots of Clarity friends!