Hello crafty friends. Well we’re nearly at the end of February, so I though it was about time I put this month’s Clarity Craft Club stamp into action! These little bears are just fabulous – I’ve scaled it right back with just the smaller bear and a tree from the Large Folk Art stamp set for a simple card of support.

I worked on one of the Autumn/Winter Backdrop Landscape tags and stamped the tree directly onto it with black Archival ink. I then stamped the little bear onto a scrap of Clarity’s super smooth paper, added shading with a grey Polychromo pencil and fussy cut him. I could then glue him onto the topper, to lie in front of the tree.

As I’d used one of the little tags and the smaller bear, I didn’t have room for the full sentiment from the set, so masked part of it off with low tack tape before inking to leave my just the ‘beary sorry’, which was the perfect size! I ran around the edge of the topper with a black Sharpie, then used a square embedder and a ball tool to emboss a frame onto the front of a 5×5 card – as the topper is a rectangle, I needed to lengthen the frame, so first embossed around the top & partway down each side of the embedder, then moved it down to the right length to finish each side and the bottom. All that then remained was to sit the topper inside the frame.

That felt like a lot of description for such a small simple card, but life is always in the little details, isn’t it? I took inspiration for my layout from the sketch at The Paper Players, which I rotated (and moved the sentiment), but which is hopefully still recognisable! I’m also going to share this at Allsorts Challenge, where they’ve got an optional twist of ’embossing’.