Hello friends. I’ve got another Christmas card to share with you today, once again using the new Christmas Build a Landscape stamps from ClarityCrafts, but this time pairing them with their Viaduct Collage die – with a bit of a twist!

I wanted to create the effect of sand dunes for the wise men to be travelling over and was puzzling how to do that with the die, when inspiration struck (it doesn’t happen very often!) I cut the upper portion of the die from Clarity’s buff paper so that I had the three pieces that come below the sky area.

This is where my lightbulb moment arrived, having sponged ‘gathered twigs’ Distress Ink across the edges of the die cut pieces. I cut a square of blue Antarctica paper to fit on a 5×5 card blank and lined the buff paper sections up on it, flipping the lower piece up to the top to give me that curved hill. Having got them in place, I made a couple of pencil marks for the top piece so I could realign it accurately, then glued each one with Pritt stick and attached them to the paper. I could then add the three wise men from the set in ‘managanese blue’ Archival ink and heat emboss the star into the sky.

Having added the topper to the 5×5 kraft card blank (the buff paper matches it so well), I added one of the gold Christmas Rub On sentiments and filled the sky with stars using a fine white Posca pen. A little shading beneath each of the camels grounded them perfectly.

If you caught yesterday’s Clarity Social TV, you’ll have seen Barbara walk through her take on how I made this card towards the end of the show – it’s always such a thrill to see my cards on screen! I’ve also managed to incorporate a few challenges into this design too… First, I picked up the middle row of any colour, free (I went with die cutting) and sentiment from TicTacToe‘s grid, the animals theme from Allsorts and The Holly and Ivy‘s usual ‘anything goes’.