Hello crafty friends. I’ve popped in to share another of my demos from last weekend’s Open Days, this time using the Dotted Blooms & Sentiment Stalks stamps, set on one of the Elements Skies toppers – I must admit these background cards are just so beautiful! This lovely sky also looks very appealing on another very hot day here in the UK, after yesterday’s record breaking temperatures!

The first step was to cut one of the A6 toppers, featuring a lovely serene sky in blue & yellow tones, into a square. I then stamped the sentiment in ‘watering can’ Archival ink and added the flower on top.

I masked off the first flower with the pre-cut mask from the stamp set and stamped a second flower next to it, adding a third one to the side. I could then stamp the stems and leaves into place.

I then shaded the flowers with blue & yellow Polychromo pencils to pick up the colours from the sky, adding grey shading along the vertical sentiment too to strengthen the look of it as a stem. I popped a few of the birds from the new Friends & Family Silhouettes stamps to give my sky scene a little more depth & perspective. Having run a black Sharpie around the card edges I simply attached it to a 5×5 card blank.

And you all know that I hate to waste any of my card stock, so I stamped another sentiment, flower and leaves onto the piece left from trimming the Skies background to a square, added a little more pencil shading and black edging and attached it as a panel on a 4×4 card blank. It makes a perfect little notecard.

And while we’re in the business of bonus pieces, here’s another topper that I made at the weekend, on a more summery blue sky with slightly bolder colours – there are so many options with this set!

I have to confess that there is still a pile of toppers from the Open Days sitting on my desk just waiting to be finished into cards. But first I’m back on Clarity Social TV tomorrow (Friday) at 10am & 2pm with some very different goodies from these ones (a bit of a blast from the past having pulled a few things from Clarity’s product stash!) I hope you can join me (or watch on catch up) and I’ll share some of them on here tomorrow and over the weekend!

Before then, I’m going to share this one with a couple of other challenges. My tones work with the palette at Creative Colour, although they’re more muted than on their colour sheet and that lovely sky picks up the ‘clean & simple weather’ theme at The Paper Players.