circle of leaves

Hello crafty friends! It is seriously H O T here in London (32 degrees C this afternoon!) and forecast to rise further at the weekend! It’s too hot to spend much time outside, so a good reason to stay indoors and craft (not that I’ve ever needed much of an excuse!) I finished off some more of the toppers I was demoing at Clarity’s Open Days last month using the Elementree stamps. This time round I picked out a couple of the tiniest images in the set (they’re easy to overlook) and created a single wreath with them. This works perfectly for the challenges at Simply Clean & Simple (I didn’t take their optional twist of pink on this one) and for Word Power.

The key to this design was creating a little raised frame on a small square of stencil card using the nested circle and solid circle embedders. First, I embossed the outer ring using the inside edges of one of the nested embedders – working against the inner side pushes the card upwards when using your embossing tool from the reverse of the card. I then switched to slightly smaller solid embedder, centred it inside the raised area, and then again embossed on the reverse side, which gives you the debossed effect on the front.

I picked my two tiny leaves, mounted each on one of Clarity’s stamp pens and opted for ‘peacock feathers’ and ‘peeled paint’. The first step was to stamp one of the images at north, south, east & west on the circle (or 12, 6, 9 & 3 o’clock) all in the same colour. I then worked outwards from each of those images, alternating the leaves & colours to complete the circle with (relatively) evenly spaced images. I added one of the new Rub On sentiments in the centre, then used a nested die to cut the topper down just wider than my embossed circle. Happily, I discovered that one of the square embedders was fractionally larger than my cut topper, so I embossed a frame on the front of a 5×5 card blank and it sat neatly within it – I could make out that this was totally planned, but…!