Hello crafty friends. I’ve finally managed to sit down at the end of a busy day looking after my grandson while his parents were doing some more work over at their new house, and I’ve got another of my samples from yesterday’s Clarity launch to share with you. Today’s card combines the SHAC Dancing Girls and the Dotted Blooms and Sentiment Stalks stamp sets. Now I’ll be honest, when the dancer stamps first arrived I looked at them and thought ‘why on earth have we got separate tops and legs in the set – what am I supposed to do with those…?!’ The penny soon dropped that they work beautifully with the flower stamps, using those for their skirts, so off I went with a little trio of ballerinas.

I started with a piece of premium card that I’d cut down to fit on an A6 card blank and marked the centre with a pencil guideline. I could then stamp the larger of the flowers I’d chosen in the middle of the card and cover it with a mask that I’d cut from Clarity’s blank material – the good news is that the final version of the stamps now come with pre-cut masks! Having done that, I switched to the middle sized flower and added one on each side.

Now that the flower skirts were positioned, I rubbed out the pencil line and then stamped the dancers’ bodies and legs into position. I had a bit of a challenge in making sure I got their legs well aligned – I practised with them first and a couple looked like they’d just got off a horse!! I’d grabbed another of my Colour Cube cards for the palette on this one so went with Polychromo pencils in ‘cobalt green’, and ‘bluish turquoise’ for the skirts and ‘dark cadmium yellow’ for their tops and shoes, adding ‘beige red’ for their faces.

I was trying to decide what to do with the background, and in the end just scribbled the blue & yellow pencils around the ballerinas, then stamped the sentiment into place, added a mount of Antarctica companion paper and attached it to the A6 card blank.

These are such delightful little figures, don’t you think? And I love the way they also work with the flowers, which adds another level of versatility.

I’m heading off to share this card with a couple of current challenges – Color Hues have got a palette of yellow and blue, while The Paper Players have got a ‘feminine’ theme going.