Hello everyone. Here we are at Monday again – the weeks are rolling by so fast and the Big Day is approaching… I’ve got some more new goodies to share with you today, as Clarity are launching a set of printed parchment squares today to complement their fabulous Twas the Night stamp set (hand drawn by Barbara to showcase the iconic American Christmas poem)

I actually got two cards out of a single piece of parchment by combining it with matching stamp and a little die cutting. First step was to stamp the image onto one of the 3.5″ stencil card squares in black Archival ink (this is the last image in the set).

I took the parchment and cut a border edge from it using the film strip doodle frame-it panel dies. I actually used two dies for this so that I ended up with the outer frame and a die cut edge on the remaining piece of parchment. I then grabbed a small nested circle die to cut out the image of the world – it was a little large so I trimmed it down with scissors. I popped a little Perga glue (made for parchment) on the back of both pieces and added them to my stamped image, making sure that Santa’s sleigh and the reindeer were lined up.

I took one of the square embedders and embossed a frame onto the front of a 5×5 card blank and nestled the topper within it.I

Now that was my original plan for this card, but you’ll know that I can’t bear to waste anything and I decided the leftover parchment was still useable, despite the die cut centre being slightly larger than the earth’s image. I had a mop-up piece of card in my stash with pale green on it, so I stamped the image directly onto it and then glued the parchment over the top. There wasn’t enough colour in the background, so I shaded it with Pergaliner pencils and used a little Dorso oil on a blending nib to smooth them out.

There’s lots more inspiration with these from my Clarity team-mates over on the website and Barbara will be putting them through their paces on Clarity’s YouTube channel at 2pm today – definitely worth a watch! Meanwhile, I’m going to share this pair over with the Peace on Earth and We Love Stamping Christmas challenges