Batty Beyond Halloween

I'll let you into a secret - bats used to terrify me - too many hammer horror movies as a kid I think.  However, one year I took my hubby to Longleat for his birthday and he desperately wanted to go into the bat house, so as it was his birthday I swallowed my fear and shuffled in.  The very patient keeper saw my fear and started to tell me about them, we stayed for over an hour, helped with feeding and even got a peek of a baby.  Fear all gone and now I love them (they won't ever get caught in your hair I promise, that's a myth!)

So today, I am sharing a couple of cards featuring my furry flying friends with no Halloween scenes in sight!    First off I couldn't resist colouring the adorable new bat in the Fang-tastic stamp set from SugarPea Designs latest release.

I stamped him onto Narwhal card stock from Lawn Fawn and coloured him with pencils - the grey base is a good one as you can add white and pale pink highlights which have a different feel to starting with white card.   I paired him with the great new bat background die from Echo Park cut from Storm Cloud card.   The sentiment is stamped on more Narwhal and I used a circle of that to separate the bat from the background (adding a simple shape behind your focal is a neat trick when working with busy patterns).  I finished with a stitched line border using the Silly Stitched die from Lil' Inker Designs.

The fun thing about the bat background is that it doesn't cut the outside edge so you can decide how wide a border you use.  For my second card I didn't cut one at all and just let it fill the front of my card.   This one is because I live with a comic geek and the die shapes just screamed bat signal to me!

I just focused on the die cut and added a circle inked with sunshine ink from MFT with a single bat snipped out of the die with scissors.  I popped it in place and drew some pencil lines to form the light beam before taking the die back off and using post its to mask where my lines were used the sunshine ink to make the beam on the base card.  The sentiments are all from the My Hero stamp set also by SugarPea Designs.

 NEWS FROM THE STORE

We will be getting a number of new releases in the next week or two:

• MFT's new release will be in store on Wednesday
• Reverse Confetti's new release is in transit
• Neat and Tangled's new release is also in transit
• Stamping Bella's release will ship to us soon
• The Hero Arts releases will hopefully reach the UK distributor this week so we should finally have them soon.
• We have orders in for the new releases from Lil' Inker Designs and WaffleFlower which should ship soon.
• We have a restock order in to Lawn Fawn and Avery Elle (including the new sized storage pockets) which should be here later this month)
• There is no new release from Mama Elephant this month - they always take September off to plan for their mega Birthday release in October so watch this space next month for that one!

Finally, an update on our DT search.  We had over 50 applications for the one post!  It is going to take me a good while to get around all those blogs and check everyone out, particularly as I always prioritise getting your orders packed over any other store admin.  So I will be taking most of September to evaluate everyone's applications with a view to a new person starting early October.   If you don't hear from for a while - that's why!