Hello crafty friends. Today’s card is another of the demos from my Clarity shows last Friday – this one uses two stamp sets from the Floral Delights collection, Thinking of You and Bouquets & Vases. I was inspired by a sample done by Tina Morris, one of my Clarity design team-mates, when these stamps were first released, but I changed the colour scheme (Tina’s was red) and added the sentiment. For my tones, I once again got out my random number generator to find a card from my Colour Cube – it gave me #180 which looks wintery but I think worked for a spring effect on these florals.

Having cut a piece of card as a topper for a slimline (8″x4″) base, I masked off the top of the Thinking of You frame and stamped it at each end of the card.

I wanted to nestle the vase amongst the foliage, so first cut three little masks from Clarity’s blank material (to do this, stamped the images onto copy paper, lay the blank mask over then and cut them out. You then still have the original piece of backing sheet to store them on, plus you can’t stamp directly onto the plasticised mask material). I ran a piece of low tack tape across the base of the wreath and then stamped the vase into place.

Next was to add the bouquet, masking the vase with the pre-cut one from the set – one of the things that’s lovely about this collection is that each of the bouquets matches one of the frame sets. Having done all that, this is the point where I realised that things hadn’t quite gone to plan… My aim was to simply use a ruler and a micron pen to join the two frames together down each side, but my stamping hadn’t been totally accurate and they were slightly offset from each other! I managed to rescue it, but had to draw thicker lines than I’d planned to – when I did this live last Friday, I masked the frames off just above the foliage (instead of at the top) which did away with that problem.

I pulled out several of my Polychromo pencils in the tones on the Colour Cube card and set about shading in the flowers and foliage. Having added one of the I Am Essential – Birthday sentiments, I popped it on a mount of blue Antarctica companion paper and then attached it to the card base (One of Clarity’s 8×8 blanks that I’d cut in half with my guillotine).

I’m so pleased with how this turned out (despite the glitch with the frame!) and it meets the themes for a couple of current challenges. AAA Birthday are looking for slimline cards and Beautiful Blossoms have got a lovely vase of flowers on their optional moodboard.