Wee tree stencils

Hello crafty friends. Here we are at Monday again and it’s nearly the end of June – we’re more than halfway through the year! Time sure flies when you’re having fun and Clarity are adding to the crafting excitement with another new product launching today – the wee tree stencils! The fab little set of 8 small images, plus an blank one and an outer ‘stencil mate’ are one of the July Products of the Month, which means you get double loyalty points on your whole order when they are added to your basket (there’s also a great little storage folder for them available too).

I played it quite straight with this design (I’ve got a couple more arty ones to share over the next few days!) and started by hinging the triple tree one onto a piece of premium card with low tack tape and running it through my embossing machine, using a rubber shim. I kept the stencil in place so I could so two more things – I first flipped it over so I could run round the stencil edges with a ball tool to sharpen the outline (basically using it as an embedder), then went back to the front and brushed ‘pine needles’ Distress Ink onto the trees. Embossing them first gives a sharper outline to the images.

Having trimmed the premium card down, I ran low tack tape around the edges so that I could blend Distress Oxides into the background – I went with a combination (from the top down) of ‘saltwater taffy’, ‘tattered rose’ and ‘speckled egg’, thanks to one of my Colour Cube cards.

I grounded the trees by sponging a little of the ‘pine needles’ across a torn piece of copy paper and added a couple of the birds from the Friends & Family Silhouette Miniatures set. I found the perfect backing paper in the Toscana set and opted to used a leftover strip to cover half the 5×5 card blank, rather than cut a new piece for a mount. I then attached the topper and finished with one of the A5 Tall Feel Good sentiments.