Hello everyone. There’s another new launch coming from Clarity tomorrow – it’s the first Sunday of the month so Barbara’s on Clarity Social TV for a bumper 2 hour show. She’s bringing us a brand new set of Build a Landscape stamps, but this time with a Christmas theme. (I’ll pop back and edit this post with a pic and link for the set once it’s available). I’ve paired them with the Viaduct Collage die set and Antarctica designer paper, which works well for the ‘anything goes’ option at Love those Pretty Papers (I didn’t take their optional twist of ‘summertime’ – quite the opposite in fact!) and the request to ‘include a tree’ at Sparkles Christmas.

So, I started by cutting a piece of the Antarctica paper to 4″ square, then lined up the Viaduct Collage die onto it, keeping the sky area whole. I’d meant to ink the die before cutting (a technique Barbara has previously used) but forgot, so instead used a sponge to catch ‘chipped sapphire’ Distress Oxide against the edges of each piece. once I’d done that, I used Pritt glue stick to attached the pieces to a 3.5″ square of stencil card and used my guillotine to trimm all the outer edges down straight.

Next was to create my countryside scene with a selection of the stamps from the new set, also using the ‘chipped sapphire’ (plus my favourite trio of birds from the Just Woodland & Birds set). It’s really helpful that lots of the images are in two sizes, so you can build perspective in a scene. And yes, my church roof does have a crack running through it – you can decide whether that’s due to the die cut or an attempt at realism, given the challenges of many country churches!!

I cut a frame for the images with one of the Lattice doodle frame-it panel dies and cut an aperture in the panel, slightly smaller than my topper. Having attached the topper directly to a 6×6 card blank, I popped strips of scrap card onto the back of the frame so it stood out from the images when I glued it down.

So why not spend your Sunday afternoon watching Barbara put these new stamps through their paces, which is what I’ll be doing. There’s never anything good on the telly in August anyway!