Hello crafty friends! It’s Monday again already, but I’ve just spent a happy hour watching Barbara Gray on Clarity’s YouTube channel – she was putting the Elementree stamps through their paces. You may have noticed that they are some of my favourite stamps – the sets come individually, but also in a bundle with the leafy BOW-WOB (black-on-white, white-on-black) papers, which I put to use for today’s card.

This is a piece I made a while ago that I fished out of my stash. I made it by first brayering Distress Oxides onto a 6×6 Gelli plate (I think it was probably ‘broken china’ & ‘peeled paint’) and then laying a piece of the BOW-WOB paper onto it, just pressing very lightly. The black printed area on the paper acts as a resist and the white areas pick up the ink, leaving a great pattern on the Gelli plate which I then printed onto a piece of stencil card.

I decided to chop it up to make the background for my card to make best use of the coloured sections – I cut it to fit on a 5×7 card blank, then cut the top section off and turned it around. I could then glue the two sections back together on a mount of white paper (I used glue rather than tape so I could make sure they butted up against each other).

I decided to add one of the Quote stamps directly onto the background (straddling the join), rather than add a topper, so I didn’t lose any of the background. I popped a couple of the little Elementree stamps either side and ran a black Micron pen across the join, which funnily enough helps to disguise it! I then simply ran a black Sharpie around the edges of the topper and attached it to a 5×7 card blank.

I like the way I managed to turn the background into a chequerboard design – and thanks to the team at Freshly Made Sketches for the inspiration!