Hello everyone. I’ve got a look at another of the new wee stencils collections today, this time using several of the Patterns set to emboss a few small squares of card.

So, having cut nine 3cm square piece of premium card, I attached them to a few of the patterned stencils, trying to get a mixture of dots and stripes, and then ran them through my embossing machine using a rubber shim.

Next was to start to mount them onto my card. I cut a 12cm (5″) square of premium card and embossed a frame onto it with a square embedder and a ball tool. That gave me a good guide for the placement of my squares within it, although I also used a Pergamano ruler to ensure they were equally placed and level with each other – I did the middle row first, starting with the centre one, then worked above and below it, gluing each square into place. I then mounted the topper onto a 6×6 card blank, and the white-on-white effect was where I was going to finish…

However… I’ve kept looking at this for the past couple of days, not entirely happy with it, and decided it needed a very light touch of colour to just enhance the patterns. Not the easiest thing to do retrospectively, but I managed to come up with a solution. First I ran low tack tape around the edge of the nine embossed squares, butting it right up against them, then lightly swept ‘speckled egg’ Distress Oxide across them with a stencil brush. That looked better, but it still needed something more so I put the embedder back into place to act as a mask and ran more low tack tape around the edges of my topper. I could then blend the ‘speckled egg’ into the frame created by the embedder, this time using one of the new ink blending brushes. That sorted it for me, and I simply finished it with a word sticker that I’d edged with a turquoise Perga Colour pen.

Are you with me in preferring the final one with the ink blending, or did you like the initial white on white? (although it’s too late now if you did!) I just think the soft tone on it really lifts the patterns from those fab little stencils.

And so I’m going to share this in the galleries of a couple of challenges looking for stencils to feature on our cards. The optional twist at Allsorts is to use stencils and Stencil Fun‘s theme is ‘patterns’ – I think I ticked that box!