Sunday 19 November 2017

Pawfect and Thanks

I have a couple of cards to share today as I needed to make cards for a friends birthday this week and I needed to thank a family member for helping us clean our new house.

Firstly we have the birthday card featuring the new MFT stamp set "New Best Friends" as my friend is a dog lover so I coloured the dogs to match her two, the seated one is actually much bigger in real life but the little one is most definitely in charge!   I used a little masking to create the scene - it's an often overlooked technique but it's a really useful way to get more from your stamps.


It's simply coloured with copics and cut with a 4 bar frame before mounting onto a card with some kraft striped paper and a sentiment embossed onto a pink flag strip.

For the thank you card I wanted to use the awesome new Botanic Thanks stamp from Mama Elephant.  We've had a few queries about the new image formats from Mama Elephant - unfortunately they have been badly hit by cheap Chinese knock off brands stealing their designs so are having to do all they can to make it harder for their designs to be stolen.  Whilst you might think you are getting a bargain - the knock off stamps are very poor quality and in the long run will put the brands we love out of business and then there will be no stamps and the knock-offs don't design their own stuff and will have nothing left to copy so please be aware and support the hard work of the legitimate brands.   OK rant over, back to the card.....


I wanted to do a little water colouring - not my strong point and I am out of practice but I find it easier to do with an embossed image.  I wanted to make the sentiment pop so I did a little double embossing to begin with.  I stamped the whole image in versamark ink and embossed it in white.  Once dry I used a versamark pen to gently trace over the outline of the letters and embossed that in gold.

From then on I just did wet into wet water colouring - allowing the colour to flood each flower and then adding green around for the leaves and finishing with a fade to nothing blue border.   It's a set that packs a big punch with extra sentiments and little leaves to fill in the stamping or add a few extra and will be handy for post-Christmas thank you cards too ;-)



NEWS FROM THE STORE

Pending move - we still don't have a date for our move.  The broadband engineer came on Friday and discovered that the cable is on the opposite side of the street and apparently they need a special permit to dig up the road and get it across to us which can take 3-5 days to get!  Once the "road team" are complete, then the installation team come back and then we'll know where we are at.  We are trying to avoid the start of the month as that is when we are busiest with the arrival of new stock so it could be we aim for an early closure for Christmas and move in mid-December.   As promised - we'll keep you posted.

For arrivals this week we will have:
  • AlteNew - will be live in store tomorrow
  • Concord & 9th - shipped on Thursday - we hope it will arrive by Tuesday customs willing.
  • Newton's Nook have a fab new release on Friday - we have it already so it will be live on release in the USA (or shortly thereafter due to the time difference and sleep patterns!)
  • We have a small MFT restock coming hopefully by the end of the week.
  • We should have the monthly add-ons from this month's Hero Arts kit soon too.

Catch you next weekend

Tara








1 comment:

  1. Both of your cards are great but the birthday one has my heart !! It's a good thing to warn people about the knock-off problem because people are pretty quiet about that.... love from France, Marjorie

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The Seven Hills Crafts Design Team