Good morning everyone! We’ve got more new goodies coming from Clarity today with these fun fishy stamps – this is one half of a set of two, with the others being the outline image (plus a matching stencil). I opted, for today’s card, to just use the solid stamp set and a single colour, inspired by a card I saw a while back on Pinterest.

I first cut myself a 6×6 square of premium card and drew a pencil circle guideline on it using one of the nested round embedders (the opening on these is bigger than that on the circle aperture stencil). I could then set about filling with a variety of the fish, all stamped in ‘blueprint sketch’ Distress Oxide and using a spot-on sponge ton distribute the ink on each stamp. I started with the larger fish first, then worked downwards in size, so that I could finish by filling in all the gaps with the smallest ones.

My original plan was not to edge the circle but, having rubbed out my pencil guideline (once I was sure the stamped fish were all dry) I decided it needed a frame so lined the nested round embedder up again and drew round the inner edge with the fine tip of a blue Perga Colour pen.

I added a couple of sentiments from the set, bending them round on my stamp mount so they followed the curve of the circle, and added a few dots each side with the Perga Colour pen. I found the right shade of blue for the mount in the Antarctica papers and then popped the whole piece onto a 7×7 card blank.

Now my friends who know me well will have been surprised to see this card as I have a bit of a secret – I can’t bear fish! Horrible flappy things! I don’t eat it, won’t swim in the sea in case I see any and can only just about cope with an aquarium, although I never hang about in one! That said, these ones feel pretty safe to me, so I went with them.

And now this shoal are swimming happily, I’m going to share them with a few challenges, starting with the ‘choose two’ theme at Time Out – I went with monochrome and CAS. Addicted to CAS have got a new theme of ‘water’ (well, that’s what fish swim in, isn’t it?!), my shoal fits the ‘S is for…’ challenge at AAA Cards, and I’ve picked up the ‘nature’ option from Simply Clean & Simple.