Hello crafty friends! It’s another design team day here in my little corner of blog-land, with my offering for our new theme of O for Outdoors at Alphabet Challenge. I’ve taken a slightly lateral approach on my card with one of the Mistletoe Build a Bauble images – but then robins live and mistletoe grows outdoors, don’t they?!

I took a slightly different approach to my one with the holly set from a few days ago, first stamping the bauble outline onto a square of premium card (cut to 12cm), lining the branch up to the top left of the topper.

Next was to isolate the bauble with the pre-cut mask (it comes with the stamps), then sponge ‘bundled sage’ Distress Oxide into it and adding a little ‘rustic wilderness’ at the top for more shading. Keeping the mask in place, I stamped the robin image into the bauble.

My robin was looking a little green at this point, so I dampened him with a water brush and blotted the ink out with a piece of paper towel. Next was to add the colour to my leaves and berries, which I did with the infill stamps from the set using ‘rustic wilderness’ for the leaves and ‘festive berries’ for the berries (appropriately!)

I could then add colour to the robin with Polychromo pencils, using a gold Posca pen to add a bit of feathery-type texture to him. I also added gold highlights to the leaves, before switching to my white pen for the berries and a bit on the robin’s chest, plus snowflakes around him.

Finally, I heat embossed the sentiment into place with WOW’s superfine gold powder, then added a mount of gold card and attached the whole thing to a 6×6 card blank.

I quite like the robin’s green background (I wasn’t sure about it halfway through the process…) but had decided to go with this colour scheme inspired by The Paper Players. The leaves and bauble also pick up a couple of the elements from the moodboard at Hand Stamped Sentiments.