Welcome to Friday! There’s lots going on today in the craft world, with the launch of the next Product of the Month (for March) from Clarity and our new theme at As You See It challenge. I decided to combine them together into one design team card for both events! The new Floral Hearts stamps are just so pretty and work really well with the single colour in our AYSI theme – and it’s time for the speed stamping challenge! That means the cards have to take no longer than 10 minutes to make (you’ll need to time it!) and this time round Jan has asked us to make them purple.

Now, the rules of our challenge are that you can gather together everything you need in advance, including mounting your stamps, etc, but the clock has to start the minute you start to ink them up or cut your paper. I made a good attempt at getting everything that I need lined up (not my strongest point!), with my stamps all mounted and my ink pads at the ready…

I then pressed ‘start’ on my stopwatch and set off! I first stamped the outline floral heart in black onto a 3.5″ square of stencil card, then sponged ‘wilted violet’ Distress Oxide onto the infill stamps that are part of the set (the frame and three flowers) to quickly add colour. Next was to shade the leaves with ‘may green’ and ‘permanent green olive’ Polychromo pencils, using the ‘violet’ one to add the dots. I quickly stamped te sentiment with the ‘wilted violet’ and then ran a purple Sharpie around the topper edges. Turning to my 5×5 card blank, I embossed a frame onto it with a square embedder and a ball tool (I do this so often I’ve got pretty fast at it now!) and then attached the topper to it.

Our speed challenges always get my pulse racing (and I even find that I’m typing faster when writing this post!) I managed to stop the clock on this one at 9m 31s – not bad going really. Are you up for the challenge? We’d love to see you in the AYSI gallery – and don’t forget to tell us how long your card took to make. Speaking of galleries, I’m going to share this card in the Inspire.Create one for their theme of ‘florals’.