Hello crafty friends. I was busy sharing this week’s Christmas card yesterday, so here I am today with my August calendar page. I took the opportunity to get the Poppy Posy A5 stamp set out of it’s packaging along with the stencil from the collection to create some soft summer flowers.

The first step was to take one of the calendar topper pieces, lay the stencil onto it and blend ‘evergreen bough’ Distress Oxide into the leaf areas with an ink blending brush. I switched to add ‘antique linen’ and ‘tattered rose’ to the flowers, although the pale pink doesn’t really show up.

Next was to stamp the Poppy Posy over the stencilled area – the stencil is larger than the stamp, so I was able to offset them (channelling my inner Eileen Godwin!) I then lightly brushed the stamped flowers with a waterbrush and dabbed the ink with paper towel to lift the colour out.

Once the card had fully dried out, I shaded in the stamped flowers with a ‘beige red’ Polychromo pencil (it’s a lovely pale pink!). I then added the sentiment with the Drop Shadow stamps using black Archival and the ‘antique linen’ Distress Oxide. I masked off part of the ‘birthday’ sentiment to just give me ‘day’, and it was all going well until I managed to misalign adding the infill stamp onto ‘happy’! I managed to rescue it by re-stamping both words onto a strip of white card (lining up the stamps properly this time!), then trimming it down, edging with a black Sharpie and gluing them over my original stamping. After running the Sharpie around the edges of the topper I attached it to my calendar page.

So this will be sitting on the wall next to my craft desk for the next month – I am really enjoying making a design for this each month and I’ll have a collection of 12 little art pieces by the end of the year!

And in addition to appearing on my craft room wall, my calendar page is going to be shared in a couple of challenges. I took inspiration from the layout at Freshly Made Sketches, having flipped it to the mirror image, and used the colour palette from Hand Stamped Sentiments.