Are any of you crafters out there like me? I buy craft magazines all the time, especially when I like the free gift. I have many of these free gifts that I’ve never used. They are all filed neatly in my stash. I bought the Simply Cards & Papercraft magazine Issue 208 a couple of weeks ago, I was drawn by the fab set of Autumn Days stamps that came free with it. This time I decided to have a play and see what I could do with them. I just love the tree stamps best of all but there are so many other lovely stamps in the set. If you look closely at the 4 leafy cards, you’ll see I used them in the background as well as for the focal arrangements. I stamped in clear versamark ink then heat embossed ising gold embossing powder. I got inky fingers blending in the autumnal colours for the backgrounds. I stamped lots of leaves and used watercolour markers to colour them in. Some of them were crying out for accenting with Glossy accents, it brought them to life and made the colours pop. I fussy cut the images then made various arrangements with them, finishing off with some die cut leaves, berries and sentiments. For the other cards I used the tree stamps to recreate a card I’ve made before with a similar stamp but this time the stamps were bigger and much better. I used post it notes and a home made acetate stencil to ink in the sky and ground before stamping the trees in black. I made them in pairs using alternative colours then die cut the Sun/moon from both at the same time and then swapped them over. I was originally intending just to make the sympathy cards but then thought of changing up the colours and adding some glitter and sparkle to make Christmas cards. I had very inky fingers but really enjoyed experimenting and have resolved to work my way through my other sets to see what I come up with. For full sized images and more details, just click on the pictures.