I have been thoroughly over excited since being picked at random as the winner of the Claritystamp Anything Goes challenge blog. Not only have I received a fantastic £50 voucher for my favourite stamps, I even got a mention in the April edition of the Claritystamp new design club newsletter! I feel very lucky and have made my first purchase with my voucher. I’ve bought a few new inkpads and will keep the rest for stamps that I really want – which is difficult because I want them all!
This month’s challenge is In the Garden so I’ve had my thinking cap on. Claritystamp had a very generous sale on at Easter which included some of the past In the Classroom sets so I bought two that I had been hankering after; the Blooming Corner kit with the remountable insects and also the Birdcage set.
I had thought about doing a children’s card with a lift the flap kind of theme. My first attempt didn’t go so well as I started by doing the background pictures first and then trying to line up and cut the apertures out of the top piece after. Once I realised that wasn’t going to work I started from the top down. Originally the card had featured some of the bunnies but then the blooming corner kit arrived and I was desperate to have a shot of that.
Having stamped around the A6 Theuva card with the blooming corner stamps I spent a good few nights going round colouring in the flowers with my Promarkers. I’m not very good at colouring so I remembered all of Barbara’s classroom advice and built the colours up slowly. I then stamped three wrought iron square stamp in the centre of the card and covered the squares and flowers with Post-it masks. Using the lovely lettuce green Adirondack I brayers across the card to give me my background colour.
I then coloured in the wrought iron squares and cut around three edges of each of the squares to give me my lift the flap effect. I could now mark out the squares’ positions on the background piece and made little pictures using a variety of stamps – I particularly like the ladybirds :).
The finishing touches – I attached the words “What can you find in the garden?” having first of all stamped them using the Letterbox kit onto shrink plastic using a black Stayzon pad and shrunk them in the oven – only took two goes to get it right this time! A couple of little buzzy bees and I was done.
Finally, both bits were put together and, using double sided sticky tape, were attached to the final A6 card.
I’m delighted with the end result and I am entering this card into the second Claritystamp Challenge, In the Garden.
craftydawn 