A Heap of Cakes

I've moved away from Christmas today as I needed to top up my birthday card stash and I'm trying to avoid eating sugar my mind naturally went to cake!  So I have lots of cake on my cards thanks to Concord and 9th's Top It Off stamp set which gives you lots of ways to combine a cake

For my first one I went off the edge to give the impression of a huge cake and layered it up with the 3 cake layer stamps but repeating the striped layer - because I went off the edge this gives me the opportunity to get more layers but still get the stepped look.  I went with pinks and greys and stamped the fun sentiments directly into the cake as the cake itself fills the card.  A few dots of Oyster Grey Nuvo drops give the look of icing to finish it off.

For the second card I went with a more autumnal colour scheme of orange and browns and this time added the candles to the top.  Finishing with liquid pearl icing highlights and a couple of sentiments from MFT's Anything But Basic Birthday Wishes as finding sentiments from other sets is a great way to get variety from your stamps and this sentiment goes perfectly with cake cards!   I used inks from Warm and Cozy and Summer Afternoon from AlteNew.

I made one more card with a more weddingy theme whilst I had the stamps out and this time just used one of the cake layers but masked it off for the top two tiers to get the stepped up look just using one stamp.   I used tea party, warm gray, and red sunset inks and finished with "icing" in oyster grey and liquid mercury.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

We will get the latest release from Lil Inkers in store later today or tomorrow - last week was a difficult week and we fell behind on store admin and are still playing catch up.

The latest release from MFT is in transit but it did ship late due to a PayPal issue so it may not be here in time for release day but we'll get it live as soon as we can.

The latest release from Concord and 9th is ordered but they never ship until around the 10th or 11th once they've got over their retail rush.  We therefore normally get that release around a week after release.

AlteNew have a stamp and die release on the 11th October - we are waiting for it to ship so are not yet sure if we will have it for release day or  not.  The new brush markers will come with that release as will the new build-a-flower.  As that brand are pretty much doing weekly releases, it is just impossible to keep up-to-date so we are trying to get them to ship everything that is released in a month ahead of time so we can release when they do but it's not proving possible at the moment. 

Mama Elephant have another release on the 15th which is gorgeous again and we will have that for release day along with whatever restocks on the last release they have available.

Neat and Tangled have just sent their new release details to us so that will be ordered this week.

We should also be able to order the new Hero Arts monthly add-ons this week (kits only available direct from them)

That's all for this week

Tara

Liquid Watercolours and Mandalas

I've been having a play with the new liquid water colours from Avery Elle this weekend.  I must admit when I saw them being peeked at Creativation I wasn't sure what the fuss was about but so many people were raving about liquid water colours in general that I knew I had better get them in store for you or risk missing out on the next big trend (lots of brands have them - we'll have the Hero Arts version in a few weeks too)

Now I am no water colourist so was not about to create a landscape masterpiece, so I just decided to play and see what I could do with them.

Firstly I just tried a background technique - I wet a piece of thick watercolour paper all over with a water sprayer and then just dropped random drops of colour in shades of green and blue all over and allowed them to expand and run.  Once dry I added some neat drops for a stronger pigment look and then added a few spatters with a paintbrush.  I allowed it to dry again and then went about die cutting it to create a big birthday wish card using the big balloon border from MFT's Blue Prints 26, their new Wish word die and the simple alphabet from AlteNew.

Next I wanted to try painted with them over embossing.  I embossed the new MFT Mandala stamp from MFT using satin pearl embossing powder on watercolour paper and then got it good and wet.  I then just drew circles of colour -the bottles are great for this technique - and spread the colour with a paintbrush.

I trimmed it down to fit a 4x6 card once dry and stamped over a sentiment from the new Anything But Basic Birthday Sentiments from MFT using versafine black ink so it would hold on the embossing.  [My top tip is to have a Kuretake Sketching pen to hand for this - its a permanent marker so will fill in any gaps!]

Whilst I was playing with Mandalas, I wanted to play with the co-ordinating die - this does not cut the stamp - it's smaller but the same shape so you could do some fun layering.  I thought that it had a floral shape so die cut it twice from some old ombre purple paper and layered them over each other to create my floral shape.  I added some silver glitter highlights around and finished with another sentiment from the previous MFT set.

 NEWS FROM THE STORE

This week we will have the following:

• The new release from Mama Elephant - it has shipped so fingers crossed will be here for release day on the 15th.
• The current release from Concord and 9th is hopefully shipping to us tomorrow so we should have it by the end of the week customs willing.
• The new release from Newton's Nook  is shipping this week.
• The new release from Sugar Pea Designs is shipping to us this week hopefully.
• We are waiting for the new Altenew release to ship. 

• We are still waiting for the Hero Arts new release to reach the UK distributor - all we know is that it is "expected late February"
• The Lawn Fawn release date has been confirmed as 22nd February.  We will have it in store on that date.

We have our Stamping Bella delivery but due to the massive numbers of new releases we've still not managed to open it all and add it to the store yet (there's a tonne of it!) so bear with us - we'll fit it in around the new releases when we can.