Hello crafty friends. I’ve got an early peek for you of the new Sketchy stamp set from Clarity, which Barbara will be showcasing tomorrow morning at 10am (find her on the ClarityCrafts Facebook page or their YouTube channel). I love these iconic images and decided to go for a vintage French style on this first card, picking up the pink & grey tones from Color Hues.

I found a lovely pale pink in the Amazonia companion paper set and started by stamping the words from the Grungy Grid & Script set twice, using ‘shadow grey’ Archival ink. I know they’re in English, but I didn’t have my in French or Latin – let’s just call it artistic licence!

I switched to my ‘watering can’ Archival ink pad to then add the large Eiffel Tower image, together with the Paris words, one of those adorable little poodles and the sentiment from the Famous Places set.

As so often happens, I hadn’t fully thought this through before I started and I wanted to find an interesting way to frame the images. Fortunately, one of the hearts doodle frame-it panel dies was the right size to cut into my paper, which I then mounted onto a piece of grey Shenandoah companion paper. I decided to give it a wider border on the card, so went for a 7×7 blank, using the largest square embedder to emboss a frame onto it before attaching the topper. I finished by scribbling a little grey pencil across the base of the tower to ground it.

I am loving the fab sketchy images and that little poodle is just so cute – although my friend did comment that she thought he looked like he was cocking his leg against the Eiffel Tower! Not quite the impression I was aiming for!