Hello friends. I’ve got another of my designs with Clarity’s new Square Tree Aperture stamps to share with you today, which were perfect for our new theme of S for Square at Alphabet Challenge. This time I’ve created a little wintery scene with the One Day At A Time set, layering it up with a square frame to maximise Alphabet’s theme.

This time, I just used the smaller of the two stamps in the set, brayered it with ‘tumbled glass’ and ‘shaded lilac’ Distress Oxides and stamped it onto a 3.5″ square of stencil card. The details on these stamps is so fine, the tree branches show up really well even with pale inks.

However, I wanted them to stand out a little more, so added a drop shadow by running a pale grey Polychromo pencil below each one for more dimension. I added one of the I Am Essential – Christmas sentiments with ‘watering can’ Archival ink and then sprinkled WOW’s ultra high embossing powder onto the card for snow. The trick with this (thanks to Marion Emberson’s tips) is to hold the card flat, sprinkle the powder on the card with your fingers, just using a pinch each time and then heat the card from below to set the powder. Don’t try it from above as all you’ll do is blow the powder off the card onto the floor…!

Rather than just add a straight mount, I cut a narrow frame of Antarctica companion paper using two nested square dies and glued it onto the topper before attaching it to a 5×5 card blank.

So I’ve managed to incorporate several squares into this card, starting with the stamp and the piece of stencil card, then adding a square frame and using a square card blank – I think that will fit the bill at Alphabet! Do come and play along with us – we’d love to see how you include squares in your designs. Meanwhile, I’m also going to share this with a few other blog challenges, starting with the ‘winter’ theme at The Four Seasons. These stamps also work for We Love Stamping option of ‘something new’ and ‘anything goes’ at Peace on Earth.