Hello everyone. I’m sharing some green toned inspiration this evening, to tempt you in to the last few hours of Barbara’s Birthday sale (20% off all Clarity products), which ends at midnight tonight! I’ve had the fabulous Trees and Their Mantles set for some time and don’t use it nearly often enough – what’s great about it is being able to take the trees through different seasons, as the trunks and branches are separate stamps from the leafy mantles (and of course changing the colours adds to that too).

The first step, though, was to create a frame on a 6×6 card blank, using the solid & nested embedders. I sat one of the nested embedders on the card front with low tack tape, flipped to the inside of the card and embossed against the inner edge with a bone folder and then a #2 ball tool, which gave me a raised centre. I then positioned the solid embedder onto it (I chose one that was slightly smaller than the centre of the nested one), then again flipped to the inside of the card front and embossed against the outer edge of the embedder (being careful not to crush my first embedder outline. That pushes the card back down the opposite way, leaving a raised frame.

Having done that, I ran low tack tape around the frame to protect it and stamped the grass line into place with ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxide. I could then add my tree trunks, starting from the left with ‘peeled paint’, then ‘rustic wilderness’ and finally ‘evergreen bough’ on the right.

I added the mantles to each tree using the same colour ink as for the trunks, but this time lightly stamping it off on copy paper before adding to the card, which gave me a lighter tone and didn’t hide the branches. While the low tack tape was still in place, I brushed a little ‘bundled sage’ around the images, sweeping it in from the edges to leave the centre a little lighter.

I finished with a the couple on the bench and the two swallows from the Family Miniatures set, together with one of the I Am Essential – Birthday sentiments.

This will be winging it’s way to a friend for their birthday, but I have to say it’s been a pretty good day here to as my new kitchen is finished! Now all we’ve got to do is clean all the dust away (it’s throughout the house!) and put everything back in the cupboards… Nice problem to have though!

And there are a few green themed challenges around at the moment, which helped with the direction I took for this card. The leaves in the bottom left corner of Inkspirational’s moodboard made me think of the trees, Seize the Birthday want green as the main colour (I think I achieved that…) and Colorful Option’s board has got some lovely countryside vignettes.