Hello crafty friends. I hope you’ve had a good start to your week? I spent this afternoon beavering away on various design team assignments whilst watching Paul on Clarity TV showcase some more of the bargains in the Big Autumn Sale. He had the Framer stamps collection on the show, so I reached for the Peace Framer set and in a moment of inspiration (or madness) paired it up with the one of the geese from the new Christmas animals set!

I started with a piece of the 6×4.5″ premium card, which I cut to a square. I stamped the Peace Framer word into the centre of the card with black Versafine Clair ink (it’s a bit juicier than Archival, so I prefer it for large solid stamps) and then masked a frame around the card edges with low tack tape.

Now, this is one of those cards that took a bit of a left turn part-way through! I placed a mini moon mask into the sky area and initially used the clouds from the Build a Scene mask set, brushing ‘tumbled glass’ Distress Oxide across it. Having lifted the mask off, I thought it all looked too pale and almost summery, so I went over the whole thing with ‘chipped sapphire’ and a stencil brush (without the mask), darkening the area – the helpful thing is that a slight effect of the clouds still peeps through!

Next was to sort out the goose. I stamped him onto a scrap piece of card with black Archival ink and shaded his hat, beak, scarf and legs with orange Polychromo pencils, adding a touch of light grey as shadow on the white areas. I then fussy cut him – his legs were a bit tricky, but I managed not to lose them!

I glued him into place, then added the sentiment from the Christmas Animals set (which kind of inspired this card in the first place! The ‘&’ is from the ‘merry & bright’ stamp in the set – I masked the words with low tack tape before inking it up. Finally, I edged the topper with a black Sharpie, then glued an offcut piece of Antarctica companion paper to the front of a 5×5 card blank and attached the topper to it.

The punny sentiment in the Christmas Animals collection do make me smile – there’s be more to come!

Meanwhile, Goosey here is off to appear in a few challenge galleries, obviously starting with Peace on Earth! The navy & orange colours are thanks to Color Dare, Cardz 4 Galz want to see animals on our cards and finally that fab central sentiment works for Word Power.