Welcome to 2019!

So as we start a brand new year I am sure we are all in contemplative mood wondering what this year will bring.  The last couple of years have been challenging for businesses with the uncertainty or Brexit and the political indecision.  We are hoping that come March things will be clearer and we can then start to plan to grow our business once we know how things will work with our relationship as a country with Europe and America.   We get lots of requests for "more" and we'd love to make this your go to store for all things paper craft related but we are still a relatively new business and have to take care how we grow as we want to be here for a long time to serve your crafty needs.  So don't think we aren't making plans - we are - but we have to do it carefully!

We have recently been working on a few things we think you will like - not new brands as yet - but changes to the store which we think will improve your shopping experience with us.  Watch this space for news in the next few weeks!

We also will be starting to plan to build a new dedicated office and warehouse space which will allow us to offer more brands  once its built so 2019 really will be a big year for us we hope!

In the short term, we did get a couple of deliveries on Monday so now we are officially back-to-work we will work on getting those in store and will be ordering lots of new releases as the brands return to work too.

Over the next couple of weeks we will have:

• The December monthly kit add-ons from Hero Arts featuring lots of fairies, dandelions, stars and wish related stamps and dies.
• Lil' Inker Designs December release - great if you love hot chocolate!
• The new release from Stamping Bella came out on Boxing Day - we did break our "holiday" and get it ordered but we are still waiting for it to ship.
• The latest release from Waffle Flower crafts is coming on 5th January.   We ordered last week but it has not yet shipped due to the holidays so may not now be here until next week.
• Next week also sees the first release of the year from MFT stamps - its a super cute and lovey one and will be in store on release day.

The weekend of the 19th January sees the Creativation Trade Show in the USA and all the brands will be featuring their big new releases there - they will be in store in February and we'll be ordering as soon as we get the information!

Now I wasn't completely uncrafty over the holidays, I did make a card I can share for a friend who had a big birthday yesterday.

I started with a big die cut bottle of bubbly using the Avery Elle Wine Bottle Die which is a nice large die for a focal point (and it's on sale if you missed it when it first came out) and paired it with a couple of wine glass shakers from the latest MFT release.  These are really easy to make shakers using the co-ordinating pouches which I filled with tiny 40 confetti using the MFT Confetti Numbers die and a few bits of added sparkle from Hero Arts Icicle Sequin Mix.

The sentiment comes from Sassy Pants Birthday greetings from MFT - one of my all time faves - as I do like a sassy-sentiment for most of my friends!

That's all from me today - we return to our normal DT from tomorrow and Tallie will be here on Friday.

Happy New Year!

Tara

Wine A Little

I've gone full-on wino this week lol!  I may be a gin girl but all my mates are wine drinkers so all the new wine themed products we've had in store recently will be getting a lot of use!

Firstly I did a simple card using the MFT dies Wine Service and Cheers

I die cut a frame using the peek-a-boo window (sorry it just sold out again but we will get it back as soon as we can) so I had somewhere to sit my bottle.   I die cut the bottle and glass and did some quick colouring with alcohol markers before covering both with a thick layer of clear embossing.  I added a gold die cut cap and a wine label - the stamping of which came from one of the sentiments in MFT's Uncorked using the selective inking technique using a momento pen to ink up each word one at a time.  I finished with a gold matt and a matching gold Cheers sentiment.

For my second card I wanted to make a shaped card so I switched dies to the larger wine bottle from Avery Elle and used it in a slightly different way than they intended!

The die cuts the bottle in 4 pieces which you then align on your card.  However as I wanted a stand alone bottle, I just drew around the die twice on some green card and cut them out with scissors.  It's an easy shape to cut so it's no great hardship. I then die cut the label part from kraft and did some scruffy embossing to the edges to give the label a distressed feel and stamped one of the larger sentiments from Uncorked onto it again.  Another gold top finished the top bottle off - to make it into a card I just scored under the gold top to create a crease to lift the front up with and then used a little strong tape behind it to glue the two bottles together.  You could make fun bottle gift tags if you just did single ones too. 

NEWS FROM THE STORE

It will be a busy week in store again this week:

• Lil' Inker Designs have a new release tomorrow which will be live in store after they release it in the USA
• This month's Concord and 9th release was delayed in customs in the USA (we are finding they are tightening up on  regulations and parcels are being held up for the smallest of reasons so we are facing many unhelpful delays) but should be here in a couple of days.
• The much anticipated Lawn Fawn release will finally be released by Lawn Fawn in the USA on the 23rd February.  We will have ours tomorrow but retailers are not allowed to sell it until they have released it in the USA so we won't be releasing ours until they do.
• The SugarPea release from last Friday will hopefully ship to us early this week so we should have it in around a week to 10 days.
• We are still waiting for the Hero Arts release but it reached the UK distributor on Friday so hopefully it won't take them too long to sort out everyone's orders and get it out to us.