Hello everyone and welcome to our first CAS Colours & Sketches challenge of 2026. Nancy’s kicking proceedings off for us with a luscious colour palette and I took the opportunity to finish my retrospective of last year’s Clarity Craft Club stamps with one of the sentiments from the November set paired with the poppies image from the Bijou Art Nouveau collection.

I started by embossing a square frame onto a 5×5 card blank using one of the pieces from the A4 square aperture mat stencil (it’s slightly smaller than the square embedders set) with a ball tool. I masked off the lower edge of the poppies stamp (the box where the sentiment would fit), inked it with black Archival and stamped it into the frame area. I could then add the small sentiment from the November Craft Club set below it.

It was then a simple matter to pick out the poppies with red & olive green Polychromo pencils, together with the frame and a few other details with a ‘Payne’s Grey’ pencil (the nearest I could find to ‘secret sea’ in our palette)

It really was that simple! And it strikes me that this sentiment is so appropriate at the moment, with so much conflict around the world. Let there be peace!