Hello crafty friends. It’s show day at Clarity, with Barbara’s regular first Sunday of the month show over on Clarity Social TV and some wonderful round masks that pair beautifully with the Folkart stamps too. I’d been saying to Barbara a while back that I’d love a bear and other North American animals in stamps, (there’s a story behind this) and now that’s what I’ve got in this set so I had to get creating with it! I also dived into my Colour Cube Vol 1 for the palette, giving myself card 110 thanks to a Random Number Generator.

Taking the 3×3″ Round Paths Landscape mask, I laid the outer part onto a square of card, then pieced all the other parts of the mask into it. I worked by removing one section of mask in turn, sponging Distress Oxides into the area, then replacing the section of mask before moving on to the next one. I went with ‘rustic wilderness’, ‘mowed lawn’ and ‘crushed olive’ for the ground, ‘weathered wood’ for the path and ‘blueprint sketch’ in the sky.

Once everywhere was inked, I removed all the inner section of the mask (they go back on the carrier sheet for next time), then carefully ran a micron pen around the inside of the outer mask part, to frame my inked image.

Next step was to build my little scene with the Folkart stamps, bringing in several trees, a couple of friends and, of course, the bear! I then grabbed a nested circle die to cut out the topper and mounted it on a layer of blue Antarctica companion paper. Having attached it to a 5×5 card blank, I finished with what felt like a very appropriate sentiment from the Feel Good Factor word stickers

Now, I said there was a story behind this and here it is! I was travelling in Canada with my close friends a couple of years ago – we were in Jasper in the Rocky Mountains with a free afternoon, so decided to go for a walk around the edge of the town. We hadn’t gone far along the path (still in sight of a row of houses) when a dark shape moved in the trees ahead of us – next thing we knew there was a large brown bear heading down the path towards us! It’s interesting how people react at times of stress (my pulse was off the scale…!) – I was at the front so began walking backwards as we’d been advised to do in case of such an encounter and was trying to sing, which apparently alerts the bear that you are there without scaring them (although all I was managing to produce was a fairly high-pitched squeak!) My friend Ian, who was behind me, meanwhile got his camera out and was busy taking photos over my shoulder (don’t ask!) You’ll see there are only two friends on the card – that’s because my friend Catherine, Ian’s wife, had somewhat sensibly decided the best option as to get as far away as possible and was already up the bank next to us towards the houses. Ian and I did come to our senses pretty quicky and followed her up there, but not before Ian had got some amazing pictures – here’s one of them. You won’t be surprised to hear we abandoned the idea of a walk and spent the rest of the afternoon in the vicinity of our hotel in the town centre!

So, there’s a couple of blog challenges that this card works for. Double D have got ‘friends’ as their theme and Cardz4Guyz are looking for ‘epic adventures’, which this certainly was!