A Clean and Simple First Birthday Card

This card was made for our youngest Great Niece's first birthday last week.  Her name is hidden in the picture; can you guess what it is?

I started by cutting a piece of Clarity stencil card to 13.5cm x 13.5cm.  I stamped the Willow stamp, which was one of the Clarity club stamps from 2018, in black ink, then added the Mountains and Hills inner mask and brushed a mixture of Tenacious Teal and a little Ocean Reef across the sky.  I had added one of the mini moon masks first.

Next I swapped to the hills outer mask and added Pampas Artistry ink using a stencil brush along the bottom.  I dragged the ink off the mask with a blending tool to add definition along the top of the hills.  At the bottom, I added a little Wild Bilberry ink so that the willow was standing by water.  By brushing more ink along the bottom and along the top of the hills, I left a lighter area across the middle to provide perspective.

Having removed the moon mask,  I added '1st' in black ink across the sun/moon using the Clarity Numbers stamp set.

I also added a couple of the birds from the Birdhouse Garden stamp set in the same ink.

I used an off cut from a previous project (see HERE) to die cut Happy Birthday, using the sentiment from the Floral Frame die set of the same name.  I cut the two words separately as I wanted to split them above and below the '1st'.

Having gone round the edges of the die cut with a black pen, I added the words to the card.

To finish, the topper was matted onto black card.  Before adding it to a 6" x 6" card blank, I brushed a little more ink across the sky, but this time added the clouds mask before doing so.  I wanted to add more interest and depth to the top of the picture.

Our Great Niece is of course called Willow and I have been planning on using this stamp for this card since I received it as part of my club offering last year.