Hello crafty friends – welcome to Monday and the start of another week! It’s also the start of our new theme at Sparkles Challenge and #201 is ‘masculine’ – perfect timing for Father’s Day cards, but any other occasion will do. It gave me the perfect excuse to play with the new Friends & Family Silhouettes again, this time opting for the Life & Love set with the fisherman sitting on the bank of a piece of the Autumn/Winter Landscape Backdrop Print card.

Not sure this starting point needs much narrative, but as you can see I cut the Backdrop Print card into quarters and stamped the fisherman on one of them with black Archival ink.

I tore a piece of low tack tape into half lengthways so that I could fold it around the blue tone on the card to create the water’s edge and then stamped foliage along it – I think I put too much of a curve in the tape at one point, as the ‘inlet’ looks a bit odd! I added the bullrushes stamp as well to ground my fisherman (good camouflage from the fish!)

I enhanced the blue at the edge of the water with a Polychromo pencil, then added an appropriate I Am Essential sentiment and ran a black Sharpie around the card edges. I picked out my 5×5 card blank, embossed a frame onto it with a square embedder and a ball tool (just about my favourite finishing technique) and attached the topper to it.

I’m sure this isn’t the last you’ll see of these fab little stamps – I haven’t yet bothered to put them away! I hope you’ll come and play along with our masculine theme at Sparkles and don’t forget to check out the challenge blog for more inspiration from the rest of the design team.

I’m going to share this card with a few other challenges, starting with We Love Stamping and 613 Avenue Create, both of whom have got ‘hobbies’ as their theme. The colours in my background pick up the pink, blue & green from Color Dare‘s palette and last, but not least, Festive Friday are celebrating Father’s Day – I’ve got patterned paper, tools (the fishing rod!) and the sentiment from their Inspo list.