Hello everyone – I hope those of you in the UK are staying safe and warm in the middle of all the snow and ice (although it’s been a few degrees less cold here on the edge of London today). I’ve got a few more cards to share with you using the new Square Tree Aperture stamps that were laun.ched on Sunday – this one features the ‘all we need is now’ set and a piece of Toscana designer card.

As you’ll have noticed from Sunday’s card, these stamps create the background, leaving the tree clear (hence the ‘aperture’ name). I wanted colour in my tree, however, so got round that by stamping onto a piece of the designer card. I inked up the larger of the two stamps with black Archival ink and planted it onto a piece of the card, which I then trimmed around the edges with my guillotine to give me an even border. Now, my stamping wasn’t the best – I was happy that I could still see some of the pattern through the ink, giving a hint of a landscape in the background, but less enamoured of the patch in the bottom right hand corner. Read on for my solution…

Before we get there, though, I used a square embedder and a ball tool to emboss a frame onto the front of a 5×5 card blank. I thought it might be helpful to recap this process, which is incredibly straightforward. I attached the embedder to the front of the card blank using folded over low tack tape to hold it in place. I then flipped to the inside of the card front, gave it a rub with a tumble dryer anti-static sheet (makes the tools glide more easily) and used the end of a Perga tool to butt against the embedder, running round it to create the initial crease (a bone folder works for this too). I then went around the embedder again with a #2 Groovi ball tool to sharpen the crease – that’s all there is to it!

Back to my topper, I edged it with a black Sharpie and mounted it onto a piece of pale pink Amazonia companion paper. Having attached it to the card front, I added one of the Pinky Gray word stickers, covering up the dodgy area of my stamping!

I love the shaded colours on the tree from using the designer card. I picked up the pink, green and blue tones from the palette at Color Dare and the ‘anything goes’ theme from Love Those Pretty Papers.