Hello crafty friends. I’m back with a look at another of this weekend’s new products from Barbara’s Sunday show – the Statement Sentiments. In contrast to lots of the smaller stamps Clarity have been developing recently, these are lovely big sentiments that definitely make a statement! I opted to sit one of them in the space created by the Lilies Aperture Frame Stencil – the gorgeous flowers and the large sentiment really didn’t need anything else adding to them.

I cut a piece of premium card to fit the A5 stencil, then ran it through my embossing machine to embed the design into my card – I find that always makes stencilled images much sharper. I popped the little piece that fits into the aperture into place, holding it with low tack tape, then started sponging colour into the flowers, sing another of my Colour Cube cards (#410) for the palette. I went with ‘shaded lilac’ and ‘villainous potion’ Distress Oxides, plus ‘carved pumpkin’ and ‘barn door’. Once done, I used a damp piece of paper towel to gently wipe the ink from the stencil, then brushed ‘bundled sage’ around the flowers to fill in the background.

I kept the stencil in place, flipped the card to the rear side and used a ball tool to emboss around the inner edge of the aperture, which gave me a raised effect. Having removed the stencil, I lined up one of the new Big & Bold Stencil Embedder solid pieces (#8) to sit within the raised border, anchored it with low tack tape and again flipped the card to the back so I could carefully emboss around the outer edge. That pushes the card back down again, which then left me with this fab raised frame. I stamped the sentiment into place with the ‘villainous potion’, inly to discover that I must have caught the bottom edge of the stamp on the card as I was putting it down – let’s just say I was not happy!! After pondering on possible solutions, none of which were ideal, I opted to leave it as it is – as it was just the lower edge of the stamp, it kind of gives a little shadow below the letters.

It was then a simple matter to attach the topper straight onto a 5×7 card blank and it was done!

I think these bold flowers work well with this large sentiment, and I’ve got lots of other options in my head for making these phrases the centrepiece of card designs – watch this space!

I’m going to share this with a few current blog challenges, starting with Triple B for their ‘blooms’ element and Stencil Fun for obvious reasons! AAA Birthday are celebrating their 7th anniversary and have an ‘anything goes’ theme, and finally I’ve picked up the ’embossing’ theme from Inspire.Create.