Hello everyone! The sun’s been shining here again today so I’m staying firmly in the summer zone with the new Summer Sampler stamps. Today’s card features the lovely little garden scene, which you can see through the framed aperture I’ve added in front of it.

So, let’s start with this pretty image, which I stamped in black Archival ink onto a 3.5″ square of premium card. I then set about shading it in with Polychromo pencils in a mixture of pinks, blue and green. I shaded the pencil colour lightly into the background at first, but didn’t like it, so went back over it to deepen the colour and then smoothed it out with Dorso Oil and a blending nib.

Next I turned to the front topper, cutting a square of premium card at 5.5″. I stamped the trellis style frame from the sampler set onto it, then diecut my aperture with one of the Nested Square Dies, before shading in the trellis with the green Polychromo.

After that, I found a co-ordinating piece of Antarctica companion paper, which I cut slightly larger than my topper. The next step was a little more tricky, lining up the card topper on the companion paper so that I could centre the next size down square die to add an inner frame to my aperture. Once cut, I glued the two layers together and added one of the Art Deco sentiments.

I wanted to add a bit of dimension behind the aperture, so covered the back of the topper with foam tape, then attached my little garden image into place. All I then needed to do was stick the whole piece to a 6×6 card blank.

Despite reworking the background, I still wasn’t totally happy with it but then Barbara showed it on screen in yesterday’s launch show for these stamps (and declared that she liked it!) and I revised my opinion! Funny how sometimes we just have to step away from things for a while before making a final decision on them!

And so I’m now going to share this with a few challenges, starting with Color Dare whose palette I used. Cardz4Guyz and Allsorts have both got garden themes running and I’m also going to share it as another offering for We Love Stamping’s ‘hobbies’ option.