Gym Rats

I've been playing with the new Gym Rats set from Waffle Flower this weekend which I love for it's quirkiness but I am not sure they are rats - I think either hamsters or guinea-pigs lol!

Firstly my friend has been part of a group of 6 who have been running 10K a day for a whole year!  I couldn't run a whole 10K in year never mind do one every day but he did it and they've raised around £7k for a hospice from it which is amazing.  So I made him a card using the set which I think is perfect for recognising his achievement.

I coloured him with pencils, fussy cut him as I wanted him to hold the handle on the treadmill so I could have him doing a "jumping for joy" now he's finished.  I added a top layer of card and die cut a window using MFT's Square Peek a Boo die and it moved a bit in my die cut machine cos I was being lazy and not using tape or my magnetic platform.  It was out by 2mm which may not seem much but on a really CAS design it really bothered me, so I did another layer and popped it on top trimming off the excess inside the window with a craft knife (didn't want to take the bottom layer off as it would have destroyed the base card)  I thought I'd share my mess-ups as there is always a way to fix them.  I added some striped red paper for contrast (that's a bit out too but I'd lost the will to live by the time I noticed that and the recipient wont!)

I had lots of fun colouring the cute characters so I decided to make another with a punny twist.

I stamped 3 different guinea-pigs (I think that's what I've landed on what they are!) on a die cut craft circle and coloured them with pencils.   I added a sentiment underneath using Owen's ABCs from Lawn Fawn, but I messed it up, so I did it again and cut a banner around it to cover up my off-centre stamping underneath!

The pun comes on the inside, and because I couldn't be bothered to spell it out with stamps, I just wrote it by hand - I think sometimes we forget we can just write stuff!  If you don't want to use your own penmanship then pick one of the many alphabet stamps and spell it out  - just visit our Alphabet section in the store.  I added another little guinea-pig inside and drew a little gin coupe in his hand to match the pun.  Very me :-)

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• We'll have the latest release from Neat and Tangled in store on Monday
• The as yet to be released June products from Mama Elephant will be in store on the 15th
• Lil' Inker Designs have a new release this week and fingers crossed it should ship tomorrow so we should have it by the end of the week customs willing.
• Concord and 9th's release that went live in the USA on the 9th should ship tomorrow also so again should be with us by the end of the week.

Catch you on the flipside.

Tara

Thankful Honey Bears

Morning and happy Wednesday to you all. Can you believe it's been almost a month since I joined the DT? Time has gone so quick, but I'm having a blast!

I'm really liking the clean and simple look recently and when I needed a thank you card for a friend I challenged myself to maximise the white space. Plus, I've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to use these cute little WPlus9 bears for a while now.

I started out with a side folding white A6 card base and used the MFT Square Peek-A-Boo Window Dienamic to die cut a window in the front of the card. With the square that was left over, I blended on some light blue ink and spritzed with some Shimmer Spray to get a sparkly sheen.

With the panel prepared and the background set to dry, I stamped out the bears and two branches from the WPlus9 Forest Friends and Curious Forest Friends sets in some alcohol marker friendly MFT Licorice Black Hybrid Ink. I coloured them in with my alcohol markers using two different tones of browns to differentiate between the warm bears and the branches of the trees, some greens for the leaves and some warm yellows for the honey. The warmer colours automatically move to the foreground whilst the cooler colours fade to the back, helping these little guys stand out from all that white. I fussy cut them all out and went around the edges with a black marker to cover any cutting imperfections.

I wanted to give the impression of a window in the front of the card so I adhered the blue background square to the back inside panel inline with the die cut window in the front panel and put the bear holding the honey in the bottom left corner. Arranging the branches so they stretched out across the open window and met in the middle, I then adhered the cute little bear reaching down for his share of the honey.

A few touches with a black gel pen to the eyes and noses, a layer of clear Wink of Stella and a crisp black 'Thank You' sentiment from the set finishes off the card nicely.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Tallie