Happy Birthday with a Little Surprise

Hey stampers, Anni here!

It was the birthday of a special (crafty) friend of mine last week so I wanted to make a special card for her! Last year we were on the return journey from a trip and we had a lot of fun celebrating her birthday in the car. I wanted to make a card in memory of this day. Avery Elle's Birthday Bus is just perfect for that. I also wanted to add a little surprise with an interactive element in the card. But more about that later...

I started by stamping the bus on watercolour paper using Versafine Onyx Black Ink because it is water-resistant. For the colouring I used watercolour. To cut out the image there are coordinating dies available.

For the background I used Altenew's Bubble Wrap Stencil. I blended a warm grey ink over it and let it fade to the upper part of the panel.

The sentiment came from the Birthday Bus set, too. I stamped it with Versamark and heat embossed it in white on a stripe of pink cardstock.

But now let's get to the fun part: the surprise on the inside of the card! When you open it, this cute little box pops up.

This interactive part is very easy to create when you use Lawn Fawn's Mini Pop Up Box die. You can find a video about how to put the box together on Lawn Fawn's You Tube channel.

I decorated the box with a cute little cat and a bunny with a balloon from Avery Elle's Party Pals.

Hope you like my take on an interactive card!
Thanks for stopping by and have a crafty weekend.
Anni

         

Birthday Bus

Hello, happy Wednesday! I have a bright and fun trio of birthday cards for you today featuring a mix of products from Avery Elle, Lawn Fawn and Neat & Tangled. Two of the cards are very similar, with the third mounted on a slightly different background.

Starting out with an A6 white card panel, I masked off the top half with some Post-It tape. I then blended on some Distress Oxide ink in Twisted Citroen and Mowed Lawn through the Neat & Tangled Tree Duo Stencil, keeping the layering light. I finished off with a light dusting of Broken China to give the slight impression of sky at the very top.

On another two A6 white top folding card bases, I masked off a wide band towards the top of the card. This time I blended on some Fossilised Amber and Squeezed Lemonade Distress Oxide Ink through the MFT Radiating Rays stencil, keeping the layers light and concentrating the darkest colour at the bottom centre.

I set these aside to dry and stamped out three of the buses and six of the clouds from the Avery Elle Birthday Bus set in some MFT Black Licorice Hybrid Ink. I coloured these in bright school colours with my alcohol markers and cut them out with the coordinating dies.

I cut the green panel down and used some craft foam to attach it to a card base. I then popped up the buses on some foam tape and adhered them to the background, adhering the clouds directly to the panels to make it look like exhaust fumes. I know from my experience, these type of buses aren't exactly environmentally friendly!

The sentiment included in the set wasn't long enough for what I needed so I pulled out the HAPPY BIRTHDAY from the Lawn Fawn Simply Sentiment set. On the sunrise backgrounds I stamped this above the scenes and below on the forest scene. I finished off with a little heart at the end of the sentiment using some Lawn Fawn Lobster Ink.

A fun set of cards that could be masculine or feminine, or given to an adult or a child. I think I like the forest background best - what's your favourite?

Thanks for reading, catch you next week.

Tallie

    

A Bus and Ice-cream Snooker

Yep that's about as random a blog post title as you'll ever read but sometimes life is a bit random.  Let's address the ice-cream snooker shall we?  Living in Sheffield you can't avoid snooker, particular at this time of the year as when the championship comes to town giant snooker balls pop up all over the city centre and they are really shiny so when I saw the ball in the new Cool Treats set from Avery Elle my thoughts immediately went to shiny snooker balls!

I started with a 5 x 7 piece of thick white card and lightly drew a centre line down the middle to line up my balls and then set to work stamping my ball repeatedly in the relevant colours using pigment inks (in my case brilliance by tsukineko) and heat embossing each colour with clear embossing powder.   Make sure you stamp every ball the same way up so the light source is consistent.  I used an embossing pen to fill in the gap that the ball doesn't stamp and embossed that too so that when you create the green base the balls will keep the white flash to make them shiny.

Once all the stamping was done I just used Forest Glades ink cube from the Green Fields set by Altenew in a direct to paper technique all over and wiped the balls clean when I'd finished.  The table edge border was hand cut with a craft knife as I didn't have a big enough die to hand and coloured with a copic marker.


I really also wanted to play with the new Birthday Bus as it's just too cute!  I wanted to make it move so stamped it onto 300gsm card and rather than using the die fussy cut it so I could also cut out the windows for added realism.

To create the background scene I used some Lawn Fawn products - the Watercolor Wishes paper pad, the Road Border (the Simple Road border would be good for "over the hill" type cards too!) and the tree from Leafy Tree Backdrop die set.

To create the movement I used MFT's Surf & Turf dies but used a partial die-cutting technique to extend the bendy channel the full width of my card and to match the curve of the road - it's a little tricky but a bit of washi to hold it in place helps a lot and I finished the ends with my craft knife.  I secured a couple of slider elements behind the bus in the channel (at either end of the bus for stability) and stuck the whole panel onto a card with some foam tape.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• There is a new release from Mama Elephant tomorrow but our delivery has not yet arrived - we will get it live as soon as we can but are waiting to hear from them where it currently is.
• We have some Hero Arts restocks and a few new items (the add-ons from last month's kit) so will have those online this week.
• There is a big Lawn Fawn release on Thursday and we'll have that in store when they release.
• We haven't got the new Newton's Nook release yet but will get it shortly.
• We will get the Lil' Inker Designs mini-release with their next release which is pending in a couple of weeks.

Catch you later

Tara