Hello again! As it’s 1st July, it’s only right that I share my new calendar page for this month, which is also my design team contribution for our new challenge at Love to Craft – as always, our theme is ‘anything goes’. This design actually has it’s origins in Barbara’s workshop day at the end of the Open Days the other weekend, when we spent time creating beautiful watercolour backgrounds on the Artisan Paper to then stamp the new Tree Canopy Scene images on (these were first released at the workshop).

So, here’s a closer look at one of my backgrounds from the workshop, watercoloured with inks, on a piece of the A6 handmade Artisan Paper.

You need to make sure your background is fully dry before stamping, but probably don’t need to wait as long as the week I took before getting it out to finish off! I stamped one of the larger groups of trees in black Archival ink, then added the canopy stamps in ‘leaf green’ Archival (an obvious choice!)

I wanted to add a mount to my topper, but didn’t want to have straight edges cut with my paper trimmer. I then remembered that the A4 Blending Mat has a deckled edge on it, so I put it to use tearing a piece of pale blue Waimea Falls companion paper – I lined up the paper under the mat and used the edge as a guide to tear the paper along.

Before attaching the topper to the mount, I used ‘vintage photo’ Archival to add the hare from the set under my trees, giving him some ground to sit on with a couple of the little grassy stamps in the ‘leafy green’. I stuck the topper onto the blue mount with Clarity’s double sided adhesive sheet and then sat the whole piece on the July page in my calendar.

I hadn’t used it before but this handmade Artisan Paper is just beautiful to work with and it takes watercolour like a dream! You can check out the inspiration from the rest of the Love to Craft design team over on the challenge blog page, and then do come and play along with us – we love to see all the fab creations in our gallery.

Meanwhile, I’m going to pop over to the gallery at Allsorts Challenge, to add this as a contribution for their ‘anything goes’ option.