Hello crafty friends. I’ve switched away from the Christmas Animals Sampler stamps today back to one of the original full size sets with the Christmas Animals – Elk stamps (I think he’s a moose, although they are called elk in Europe!!) I was absolutely delighted to be a winner in a previous Male Room challenge and they invited me along as a guest designer for this new theme of ‘animals’ – and my moose fitted the bill perfectly!

Once again, it’s another simple layout with a little pencil shading. The first step was to cut a 10.5cm (roughly 4.25″) square of cream card and stamp the pine bough, moose and sentiment (from the separate Christmas Animals sentiments) in black Archival ink.

Once the ink was fully dry, I set about shading everything with my Polychromo pencils, using a blending nib to smooth out the browns on the moose.

All I then needed to do was give him some ground to stand on by sponging a little ‘walnut stain’ Distress Oxide across a torn piece of copy paper and attach the topper to a 5×5 kraft card blank.

And that’s all there was to it! In fact, I so love this quizzical moose that I carried on and made a batch of 20 of them! Do check out the inspiration over at the Male Room from the talented design team and then why not come and play along – there are so many possibilities with this theme!

My little moose/elk is heading over to join the fun at CAS Christmas, where their theme is ‘reindeer’ (moose, elk and reindeer are all part of the same family, after all!) and at Make My Monday‘s ‘winter animals’ challenge.