When I first saw the Baby Bear set in the catalogue, I knew he was going to be on my first order. It’s not as if I have masses of friends having babies at the moment and need welcome baby sort of cards, but the set was still necessary. Immediately! I didn’t realise until this morning when I stamped him, just how incredibly detailed and realistic he looks.

I messed him up the first time, but then found that by stamping the most detailed colour first – since it’s the darkest colour – it’s much easier to line everything up. I also concentrated on getting the bottom of him right and everything else fell into place. Concentrating on his paws or ears doesn’t work because not all of the three stamps have the details at the edges. So I started with soft suede and did the detailed layer, then moved to the middle less detailed layer and stamped in crumb cake. The final layer which is just a block of colour, I did in crumb cake stamped off once.

I was planning on stamping the ribbon and did so – in sweet sugarplum and rich razzleberry but I felt that the bear looked so real, he needed a real bow. I found some pear pizzazz cotton ribbon in my stash and that set the rest of the colour scheme. The sentiment wasn’t planned – I just happened to stamp the practice bear on a piece of scrap which had the Thank You from Vertical Greetings and it really fit. I added a skinny soft suede mat before adding that to the pear pizzazz card base. I happened to have an envelope liner cut out already so I used that to dress up the envelope.

I hope you are having a great start to the weekend.

See you tomorrow,

Liz