Grateful Twice!

 Hello! Hope you're having a lovely day. I'm just back for a guest post and as I love floral stamps, this Concord and 9th 'Grateful For Everything' set seemed a good candidate to be inked up. There's a great matching die set if you're not a fan of cutting out too

I thought I'd create using two different mediums and started off with a watercolour pen. You can get the same look using Zig Clean Color Real Brush Pens and an AlteNew waterbrush. Stamp and and heat emboss with white embossing powder first

The set has these beautiful mini spatters that really soften the look around your image and also an image (that I've not used yet) to perfectly match up around the outside so you can have a watercolour-esque band of colour around your image. I decided to try a different look using pencils on black cardstock

Black cardstock isn't as straightforward to colour on without adding a white or light layer of pencil first. I did a shortcut and added a light wash of white acrylic paint which really sped the process up!

Using pencils is all about adding layer upon layer of different colour to get the dimensional look. I'm still learning using them, but love the softness they bring to a project. You could start off your journey with these Prima watercolour pencils and use them with or without water

I finished off the card with a few sequins and a little paint splatter from some white acrylic paint. You can see my mistake here as I was colouring at night and picked up a blue pencil instead of white for colouring around the outside!

I truly love this stamp set as there are so many looks you can get from it! The sentiments focusing on being grateful are wonderful too!

Thanks for joining me today, and I'll see you again sometime!

Keren xx

For the Love of Plants

Hi guys and Happy Monday!  Strange to hear from me on a Monday but we were in Hull until the wee hours of Sunday so it seemed sensible to switch things up with Jenny to give me some time to wake up!

I have a simple one layer card today using a brand new stamp set from Paper Smooches called Garden Greetings.  I really love the planted love word in this set and decided to try it just with simple pencil colouring on kraft using the new to us watercolour pencils from Prima.

I just stamped each letter in a line directly onto the card and then coloured it in with pencils from Spring & Fall and Vintage Lover blending with a water brush.  Quick and simple but with a quirky touch.  I left off a further sentiment but it would be a great new home card if you added "your new home" underneath.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

As always, the first couple of weeks of every month are always crazy busy with releases - its a little like painting the forth bridge and is a never ceasing task of ordering, checking off new arrivals and spending ages adding it all to the store, all whilst keeping on top of your orders.  We try very hard to keep on top of thing but bear with us when we struggle as we have lots going on outside of the store that we can't discuss just yet.  

Here is what we expect in June so far, roughly in the order we expect their arrival:  

• We've had a Paper Smooches delivery with the brand new items from the last 2 releases plus masses of restocks, particularly on their dies.
• We have a restock delivery from Mama Elephant which will be in store later today ahead of their new release as usual on the 15th of every month.
• The brand new release from MFT will be in store on Wednesday.
• Our AlteNew order has shipped so we will have their latest release and the latest build-a-flower sets in stock soon along with masses of restocks on older items (sorry no bold alphabets - blame Jennifer McGuire!   We'll try again for those next month)
• We have new items from Neat and Tangled coming soon too.
• We have ordered the mini release from Lil' Inker Designs from May along with their major release from this month which will release on 14th June so we'll have it all in store for release day.
• We have ordered the "as yet to be revealed" June release from Concord & 9th.  They release on the 9th of every month but although we order before that date each month they never release stock to retailers ahead of 9th - it usually ships a few days later so we get it around the middle of each month.  Turnaround fans are going to be VERY happy with this release ;-) We have lots of restocks on order with the new release too and they will all come together.
• We have some Hero Arts restocks and new items on order too.
• We have some new items from Echo Park due later this month as well.
• We'll have last month's Newton's Nook release along with this months later in June. 
• SugarPea Designs will also have a release shortly - we've seen it and are just waiting for an order form so we can get our order in for you.

We try to give you as much information as we can upfront, but please try to accept that we cannot give individual responses on individual items and when they will be in store.  If a brand comes back and the item you wanted didn't - it was out of stock at the time we placed our order and rest assured we will just keep trying to get it back every time we place an order.  Popular items can be out of stock for months but we keep trying!   Please check back here and on Facebook regularly for updates as this gives us more time to get on with the important business of getting your orders out to you!

Tara

All At Sea

I've got 3 fun cards to share today all on a sea theme using new products from Hero Arts and Avery Elle - it's a long post so grab a cuppa!

Firstly I couldn't wait to play with the Tentacles stamp from Hero Arts - as soon as I saw it I had loads of ideas for how it could be used  ("I feel your pain",  "Just reaching out",  "Hang in there" etc etc) but I also thought it would make a fun birthday card.

I stamped it onto cartridge paper so I could water colour using the new to store water colour pencils from Prima - you can either wet the pencils and paint directly with them, or use them like a normal pencil and blend with a water brush and that's the approach I took.  I used the Spring & Fall and Vintage Lover sets.  To twist it into a birthday card I drew some simple birthday image (cake, candles, present and a cocktail glass) as if the tentacles were holding them and raising them up out of the sea - they were very simple shapes to draw but you could search your other stamps for smaller images to stamp instead if you didn't want to draw.  I fussy cut it out and mounted it onto a sheet of paper from the Lawn Fawn Watercolor Wishes pad and added a wave using the Mama Elephant's Ocean Waves Trio die.   I wanted strong colour on the wave so I used Prima's water soluable oil pastels - these are great for adding bold colour to large areas and blend really easily with a water brush.   The sentiment comes from MFT's Twice the Wishes stamp set.

For my next card I also twisted things up a little.  The way the narwhal's on Avery Elle's Extraordinary face each other reminded me of a guard of honour at a military wedding so I decided to make an underwater wedding card for a couple of crabs....

I stamped the narwhal's onto post-it tape so I could mask them and cross their horns to form the guard of honour.  I took the shell and hat from the new Manatee Stamp and Die set from Hero Arts and stamped them onto post-it tape again so I could mask them and stamp the crab from Avery Elle's Bubbles set so I could change it into both a bride and a groom.  I added a scribble line to form a veil for the bride.

I coloured all the image with Zig Clean Color Brush markers and a water brush.  I tend to prefer to scribble my colours onto my acrylic block  and pick them up with the water brush as I can blend the colours that way and its a nice soft water colour look.  For the narwhals I used green-grey and turquoise-green - putting them on either side of the block gives you 3 colours from 2 pens.  You can get a bolder colour effect if you blend the pens directly on the paper so they are very versatile.

To put the whole scene under the sea I used the Abstract Wave Stencil from Hero Arts with sno-cone ink (a really soft colour) directly over the top of the whole card - it's quite scary to cover up your careful colouring but a soft colour does work!   The sentiment is from Extraordinary - i just selectively stamped "birthday" to make it just "day"

For my final card I went full on Jaws (well it was on TV last night!) with the new Paper Layering Shark and Killer Messages Stamp Set.  The recipient would need a slightly twisted sense of humour but it made me laugh and was an easy make. 

I die cut the shark from white card and used glossy accents on the teeth.  I used the Rock Collection ink cube set from AlteNew to colour it - using the palest shade all over to create a base colour and then as shark skin feels like sand paper I wanted to add texture to I used a small piece of natural sponge to dab on some dotted colour in the two darker shades.  I used the darkest to blend the inner mouth and then just wiped all the ink off the teeth as the glossy accents resists the ink.  I used a couple of layers of it on the eyes too so they were raised and really shiny.

I used Cool Summer Nights to blend a sea background onto more white card getting darker at the bottom and I trimmed the top so it was just a little shorter than my base card so I could have my swimmer swimming on the surface.   I finished with a sentiment from the Killer Messages set stamped in red for the realistic Jaws feeling!

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• We have the latest couple of releases plus restocks from Paper Smooches in transit and will have them next week (not sure what day yet as Bank Holidays make customs even more unpredictable than usual!)
• We also have MOST of the new release from Lawn Fawn coming back hopefully on Tuesday - we ordered the day after release day but they had already sold out of a few items themselves so we just grabbed what we could.  We'll try again for the other items when we see they have them.
• We have also ordered more from Mama Elephant to try and get the cats back in stock as they sold so quickly but again, we are waiting for it to ship.  Brands can take 2-3 weeks to process our orders which is why we can't always get everything back as quickly as you'd like but we do get everything back eventually so use the out of stock notification system to make sure you don't miss out on items you want when they come back!
• We have the latest release plus masses of restocks from AlteNew on order but are waiting for them to ship.
• We will also have new releases from Newton's Nook, Lil' Inker Designs, Sugar Pea Designs, Neat & Tangled and MFT coming in the first couple of weeks of June - more details of what will be here when will be in future Sunday posts.

Enjoy your bank holiday - catch you next weekend.

Tara