A Herd of Birthday Bunnies

Hello, crafters! Tallie here today with a cute little bunny birthday celebration! This uses three different sets - Starry Scene, We Herd and Essential Sentiments - from three different companies - Avery Elle, Waffle Flower and My Favorite Things. It's such a great and simple design that you can customise both colour-wise and scene-wise to your tastes.

I started out by stamping the Starry Scene background onto an A6 card panel with some Distress Oxide inks in Broken China, Mermaid Lagoon and Faded Jeans. Here's a tip: to get a smooth transition between the colours, after inking up the portion of the stamp use an ink blending foam to blur the lines. This worked wonderfully on the Distress Oxides! I set these aside to dry to work on the foreground.

I stamped out the group of bunnies and balloons from the We Herd set in some MFT Extreme Black ink. I coloured these with my alcohol markers, sticking to cool greys and contrasting reds and oranges. I cut these out with the coordinating dies.

I white heat embossed the 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY' sentiment from the Essential Sentiments set onto some black card stock and die cut it with a Lawn Fawn Everyday Sentiment Banner die.

Using some foam tape, I popped up the pieces over the background panel. I added some of the balloon strings with a black pen and a little bit of Wink of Stella to to add some sparkle to the balloons.

A cute little birthday card scene!

Thanks for reading, catch you next week.

Tallie

  

Life Happens....Coffee Helps

Hello, it's Liz here today. We love going out for coffee and our morning routine is very much organised on where we will go for our flat whites and pain au chocolates, and a dog muffin for Mili!

So everything on this card is perfect for that coffee loving friend. I stamped, coloured and cut out 'curvy girl loves coffee' by Stamping Bella (matching dies are here). Unfortunately this stamp is out of stock at the moment due to the success of the recent sale but you can click on the 'notify me' button to be told when new stock arrives.

Then I stamped all the coffee cups and pot from the 'coffee date' set by My Favorite Things with co-ordinating ink pads (matching dies are here). Love that the stamps in this set do the colouring for you!

And what do you do when your stitching is wonky? Make it even more wonky - twice!

A Swell Background

I'm all at sea today with a couple of cards using the Swell stamp set from Avery Elle.

I love that this stamp is such a large background but I decided to make it much 

more versatile by carefully snipping the little boats out of the wavy scene.... it's easy to do 

with a sharp craft knife or scissors and you can always add the boats 

back into the design if you want to..

With the boats separate, you can ink them in different colours as I've done here.

I've used a circle die to cut a central aperture then layered a smaller aperture 

under the front panel to give a blue border to the design.

I've used part of the sentiment from the same set and added 'Birthday' on a banner 

with Swinging Borders and Lots of Letters by Mama Elephant.

Another fun thing you can do with the boats removed from this background 

is add different images in their space... like this seagull from Beside the Sea.

The waves and birds are embossed in white and I've cut a circle aperture again 

and used the die cut to make a recessed window..

The seagulls in the Peek a Boo Summer Pals was the perfect fit for this card so I've 

paper pieced them and tucked them into the window... one of them had to be 

the Birthday Gull so it has a party hat!!

It may seem scary chopping into photo polymer stamps but as long as you're 

careful it can really make those supplies stretch that bit further with your creativity.

This is what my stamp looks like now... and I can just pop the boats back into 

the holes and still use it as intended.

Just to note that some of the stamp sets I've used have now sold out in store due to the 

very popular sale over the weekend, please use the notification system for when they 

come back in stock if you'd like to purchase them.. thank you

  

  

Thanks for stopping by :)

Jenny x

Take Two Dies......

I've got a couple of very different cards to share today both made using the exact same two dies - the Dainty Blooms Cover Die from Altenew and the Big Happy Birthday Die from Mama Elephant.

For the first card I die cut the dainty blooms 3 times, from Papaya,  Pesto and  Pebble Hero Arts Cardstock.   Pebble was the frame and then I pieced in the papaya for the blooms and pesto for the leaves, adhering it all onto a white background and leaving some gaps of white so the image reads more clearly.

Once I'd pieced it all together I blended some darker colour onto the leaves and petals with copics and then glued them all down - I won't lie - it took a while, but paper piecing is one of my favourite parts of paper crafting and I love a jigsaw so this time I did it manually one piece at a time.  However you can significantly speed it up by applying press and seal to the die cut before removing it from the die, remove the pieces you don't need then put press and seal on the front, glue the back and piece them all in at once.

Once I was happy with the overall design I wanted to add a sentiment but I didn't want to cover up all my hard work so I decided to get into a little double-die cut action and cut the sentiment from the finished piece.  Now this is essentially two layers of quality cardstock so it will take a couple of passes and a shim but it will cut.   I mounted it to a white base card and added 3 stacked layers of black behind the sentiment to make it stand out and then finished with some liquid pearls in yellow to fill in the stamens.

Then, I had a leftover papaya and pesto frame to play with so decided to make another card.  For this one I used the papaya frame but brushed some Altenew Enchanted Gold ink over the top to give it a richer finish.  I then picked out the stamens and leaves with metallic markers and added the whole thing to an Antique Ivory base card. 

Again I didn't want to cover the whole design with the sentiment but I wanted to stick with the same die, so this time I cut it from two layers of vellum and glued that together and over the top - you can still see the design through but the double layer of vellum breaks it up enough that your eye easily reads the words.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

We are expecting the latest mini release from MFT this week along with lots of restocks but it may take us a while to get them into store as we have a LOT of orders to process following our heatwave sale and orders always take priority for us.  We will do our best to catch up as quickly as we can but other than Monday when Liz works for us - there are just two of us doing EVERYTHING - we really are a small independent store as much as you think we're hobbycraft!

We will also be getting some Kuretake paints and pens back as a new UK distributor has started to stock a small range.   Zig pens won't be back as the price point has doubled.

We will have some restocks from Ranger - we are still waiting on oxides to come back into stock but hope they will have a delivery soon.

We've had lots of people asking for the Lawn Fawn ruler - we can't get it as they aren't selling it a wholesale prices.  I know another USA store is selling it but they are selling it at a higher retail point than Lawn Fawn themselves as they bought it at retail prices - if we do that and then apply the import costs - it would be over £22 for us to sell it not at a loss.  So....   we've found a few alternatives and they will be in store this week too fingers crossed.

We will also have a few Fiskars paper trimmers and craft knifes - we are trying to add "essentials" to store as we grow along with the USA brands you know us for - we hope this will make us a more convenient one-stop shop so if there are non-USA essentials you'd like to see in store please let us know.

Catch you later

Tara

Happy Belated Birthday

Hey stampers, Anni here!

I am back from vacation in France - it was so great!
When I go on vacations I always take something to colour with me. This year it was all about colouring with Distress reinker. I bet you will see many images that I coloured on vacation in my next posts.

Today I chose the smaller one from the cute sailing ships from Lawn Fawn's Smooth Sailing. I coloured it five times in rainbow order using the no line technique. The trick is to stamp with a light ink and create shadows with your colouring to define the shape. In this case it is quite easy as it is a simple shape. If you new to no line colouring start with those simpler shapes to get into this technique easily.

To create the ocean I took some vellum and die cut it with Mama Elephant's Ocean Waves Trio. Into these two pieces of vellum I die cut waves using Lawn Fawn's Ocean Wave Accents. These dies are perfect if you want to add waves in the inner part of the paper. Now I could slide the ships in the cut to make it look as they were really in the water. I also added "spray" with a white gel pen.

I wanted some colour on my vellum so I took the ink directly to the backside using Altenew's Lagoon ink from the Sea Shore Ink Cubes. You have to be careful as it dries very slowly on vellum. I used my heatgun and wiped the vellum with a paper towel.

To the vellum I also added the sentimet. As I missed some birthdays while I was on vacation I wanted to make a belated birthday card. I found a matching sentiment in Lawn Fawn's Hang in There set and heat embossed it in white.

As it is always difficult to adhere vellum without the glue showing I decided to add a frame to my scene. I die cut the biggest of My Favorite Things' A2 Rectangle Frames from white cardstock and adhered it with dimensional adhesive.

Do you take something to craft on vacation with you? Let me know, I am curious.

Thanks for stopping by and have a crafty weekend.
Anni

               

Found on Friday July Part 2

It's time for the second edition of our regular Found on Friday feature where we feature projects made by our customers using products we sell in store.   Our customers share these makes in our customer only VIPs group here on Facebook and I check through each month and pick the makes that catch my eye.

I'm starting with a few rainbows - all different - but who doesn't love a rainbow colour scheme?  First off we have this adorable new baby card from Felix - I really love the idea of stamping the name repeatedly to fill the background and the rainbow colour scheme makes it super fun!  If you want to give it a try then grab the Milo's Alphabet she used - it's probably my all-time favourite alphabet stamp.

Jodie also created a super rainbow cloud background which is the perfect background for her Book Worm Squidgy by Stamping Bella.   It's like her dreams are rising from the book. 

My final rainbow is the fabulous number from Claudia.   She's gone to town with masking and repeat stamping using Mama Elephant's Birthday Bash stamp to fill her background before colouring it like a rainbow - how could that not fill you with cheer on your birthday?!?!?

From rainbows to ombre - Karen made a number of these cards in lots of colour ways and I love the design but also cos you get 2 cards from one die cut session!  She used one of my favourite die sets - brilliant size for spelling out lots of words for cards - Little Letters by MFT.

What caught my eye with this card was the shape of the design - I do love an usual design I've not seen before and this circular easel style card is such fun!  Sophie used a range of birthday themed stamps from Lawn Fawn to create this card but with a set of circle dies you could take the shape down any theme you like!

For my final card this month I went with this super cute set of kitties from Fiona - you all know I'm a sucker for a stamp with a cat, but I also loved how she framed the image and made the sentiment part of the frame - it really works!    The image is Squishy Cats by Stamping Bella.

That's all for this edition - we'll be back with 2 more editions in August so get sharing your makes to the VIP group if you want to be featured on the blog and our social media feeds.

Tara