Joy to the World with Alpha Dies

Hello everyone! This is Julia and I’m popping back into the SHC blog to fill in for Taheera today. Hope you guys don’t mind.

I want to show you which wonderful and clean designs you can create with simply alphabet dies. I especially love these Journaling Alphas from Neat and Tangled: the letters are nice and big, but at the same time they are very narrow so you can fit entire words or sayings on a card front. And what better to say "Joy to the World" now that the holidays are just around the corner?

You can see that I also added dimension to these letters. You can do that via a few different methods:

1. Put some double-sided adhesive on the back of your card stock and die cut the letters a few times each, then layer them up. That’s a bit fiddly, but I find this to be the quickest way, still.
2. Skip the double-sided adhesive and use some form of liquid glue. I tend to make a mess, so I abstain from that method.
3. Use some craft foam (ideally, maybe add the double-sided adhesive to the back before you die-cut?). You’ll have to give this a test run with your dies/die-cutting machine. With very thin and intricate shapes, foam can be a bit tricky.

For the color, there are many options once more: I used red glimmer paste from Nuvo/Tonic. To make it easier for me, I die cut the letters first, but left them in their card stock piece for the moment. Then I applied the glimmer paste on top, trying to spread it so it would cover about 2/3 of each letter. I let it settle (not dry completely) and then carefully grabbed each letter where it didn’t have the paste and adhered on top of its stack (the stack was already glued to the card base). This way, I could ensure to only get the paste on the very top, and not smeared on the sides. If this is too messy for you, or if you don’t have this paste, you can also:

• use Copics, watercolor, or pencils to color in the letters.
• use Nuvo’s Drops to cover the letters partially and add a nice raised effect to them.
• add shimmer with a Shimmer pen to your colored letter, and then cover it with Glossy Accents for more effect.

I’ve added a few mediums that would work well instead of the paste in the supply list below.

I hope you got inspired! Thanks for stopping by today, and happy holidays to all!

Have a FanTAGstic Christmas!

So we're officially in December and Christmas is now just 4 short weeks away - eek!   I am more disorganised this year than ever before and have not even bought any presents or finished making my cards.  However I have been busy making my gift tags this weekend - so I have something to put on the presents I haven't bought!  Genius right :(   At least I have something to share with you all - so here are my Santa inspired tags.

Firstly I've been playing with the wonderful journaling alphas and number dies from Neat and Tangled with glitter paper cos you can never have enough glitter at Christmas.   Simple red and black and you have the perfect Santa inspired tags.

I just used the Pierced Traditional Tag Stax from MFT and die cut the largest one from red glitter paper and die cut Ho! Ho! Ho! from black and used a zig squeeze and roll pen to apply glue to the back to adhere the letters.  This is a great glue for working with glitter - just make sure it's dried to the tacky stage before applying it as it's not sticky enough when its still blue!   It's also thin enough for working with fine die cuts like this.

For the smaller tag I switched to a black background and added Ho cubed and a band of red to jazz it up.

Next is the first of batch of tags that I am going to be making using the same genius set from Lil' Inker Designs which is for sure my favourite Christmas set of 2016 - Moody Santa.  I think Laura designed this set with my family in mind as we do often have to paint on that "I love it" face!

I die cut my own craft tags using the same pierced die set and added some striped kraft paper from the Kraft Collection papers from MFT and simply adding a die cut Santa and a matching sentiment from the set.  For the socks tag - I will giving lots of people festive socks with this tag on as a bit of jokey present so wanted to switch one the sentiments around.  It is very easy to cut apart your sentiments - you don't damage your stamps in any way and can always put them back the way they were intended but chopping them up means you can do more with them too!   The little tag was a way not to waste the scrap of kraft left after cutting the first two tags - a Santa would just fit but I thought the sentiments were fun on their own too!

As I am going to make LOTS of these, I've been taking the Santa's around with me anywhere I knew I'd have a few minutes spare for colouring.  I just stamped up a few sheets and then took my inktense pencils and water brush with me.

There are 3 other facial expressions to choose from but I wanted lots of his disappointed face to match my sentiments. 

That's all the crafting I've managed this week!

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• Tomorrow we will have the latest release from Wplus9 in store
• There is a new release from MFT on Wednesday - our order was not packed as quickly as normal so we may not have it in store until either late Wednesday or even Thursday but will get it live as soon as we can.
• There is no new release from Mama Elephant this month but we do have a large restock order in transit which will be here this week.
• We will have the new 'Lil Inker Designs release this week as well.
• The new Reverse Confetti release is also in transit.
• If you haven't signed up to our newsletter then you will have missed the news about our gift vouchers which are now live in store 

Christmas Posting Dates and Closure

The dates below are the Royal Mail's last recommended dates for post, however, given our recent experience we are finding orders are taking longer than normal to get through their system and we can only imagine this getting worse the further through the month we go, so if you need something for Christmas we recommend ordering sooner rather than later to avoid disappointment as there is nothing we can do about it once it it is in the Royal Mail system.

Destination	Last Posting Date
Cyprus/Far East/Eastern Europe (Except Czech Republic/Poland/Malta/Turkey)	7 December
Greece/Australia/New Zealand	10 December
Czech Republic/Germany/Italy/Poland	14 December
Canada/Finland/Sweden	15 December
Austria/Denmark/Netherlands/Norway/Portugal/Slovakia/Spain/Switzerland	16 December
Belgium/France/Ireland/Luxembourg	17 December
UK	21 December

 
As we have to get our last orders to the post office by 3pm on the 21st December - we will be closing the store at NOON on the 21st December.  The store will remain closed over Christmas for our annual break and stock take and will re-open at 9am on Monday 2nd January 2017.   You will be able to browse the store and add items to your wishlist but you will not be able to add items to your shopping basket during the closure period.