Hello crafty friends – I hope you’ve all had a good weekend! I’ve spent today catching up with some of my new DT samples for Clarity Crafts – there are more new products coming over the next few weeks, but first I want to share a sample for a new collection of blank printed greetings cards, perfectly ready to have colour added. They’re being launched on tomorrow (Monday) afternoon’s Clarity Social TV by Jazz & Paul, and I’ll add the product details here once they’re live on the website.

I took the poppies spray card for this one and decided I wanted to add a frame to it. I started with a Nested Square Embedder, lining the inner edge up for the top and side of the card. I then flipped the card open and ran a ball tool against the inner edge, but being careful not to go all the way down the side as I wanted to lengthen it. Once I’d done that, I slid the embedder down the card to enable me to finish embossing the side of the card. Using the inner edge of the embedder pushes the card up to give a raised frame.

I switched to a rectangle embedder and lined it up to sit inside my first embossed edge, attaching it to the card front with doubled over low tack tape. Flipping back to the inside of the card, I embossed around the outer edge of the embedder (being careful not to flatten my first embossing!) Once done, I turned back to the card front and had a nice raised frame on two sides around the printed image.

Next was to shade in the image with Polychromo pencils – I went with ‘pink madder lake’, ‘rose carmine’ and ‘madder’ on the poppies, ‘coral’ and ‘beige red’ on the smaller flowers, and ‘earth green yellowish’ with ‘permanent green olive’ on the leaves. Once they were all coloured, I used a blending nib and Dorso oil to smooth out the shading, especially on the poppies.

It was then a simple matter to just add one of the Bijou Tall Feel Good sentiments onto the card front (I didn’t have one that said ‘take time to smell the poppies…’) and it was done!

I’m looking forward to seeing what my fellow Clarity Design Team-mates have done with these colouring cards and I’ve got another offering to share with you tomorrow – there’s so much potential in them, especially if you’re not confident with stamping.

Before then, I’m going to share this with Allsorts Challenge for their ‘in the garden’ theme