Sea-Prise Birthday Party!

I've got some fishy birthday wishes going on today featuring the fab new Sea-prise! set from Avery Elle along with a couple of their older sea themed stamp sets.

The inspiration for the card actually came from their fun new circle frames die which I thought looked like 4 portholes.........

I started with a square base card and covered the front with some paper from Reverse Confetti's Fun Time paper pad and die cut the 4 circles from it.  To emphasise the porthole effect, I picked the circle die that closely matched the frames circles and die cut it 4 times from white card.  I then lined a circle up (one at time otherwise they overlap a bit if you do them all together) on the Avery Elle die and ran it back through the machine to get my dotted circle rings.

To finish the front I wanted the word "sending..." so it pairs with the sentiment inside but I couldn't find a die to fit the space I wanted so I decided to just use word dies and let the sentiment flow around the portholes.  I think we can get hung up on "straight" sentiments and sometimes mixing it up just works.  I used the simple alpha from AlteNew.

To create the scene on the inside I just drew very light pencil marks through the circles so I knew where to stamp.  Starting with the grinning shark from Sea-Prise as I just wanted his teeth in the porthole so there was an element of reveal when you opened it up.  I did the same with the puffer fish - trying to not show the party bits from the outside.

I added three dots with a pen in front of the top sentiment to link it to the sending on the front and put the second sentiment from the Sea-Prise set at the bottom.   I added the whale from whale hello which I just realised has been discontinued so I am sorry about that but I forgot to check before I used it.  You could add a mermaid or some of the other fish from "that bites" which is where the front facing fish comes from.

I filled in the final porthole with the shoal of fish from Sea-Prise and filled in other gaps with them too before adding a very light blue colour wash over the background to finish and give it a more sea theme.  All the sea creatures are coloured with pencils.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

It will be another busy week of releases this week:

• Mama Elephant will be live on Tuesday
• Lawn Fawn will be live on Thursday

We also expect to get deliveries from the following brands this week and will get them online as quickly as we can around the major releases as we have no packing assistance this week so order packing will take priority over loading stock:

• Neat & Tangled
• Newton's Nook
• Concord & 9th
• Hero Arts Restocks

OK that's all for today, catch you next weekend.

Tara

All Things Avery Elle

Sorry for the late post - we were out at a gig last night and early mornings are not good after a late night these days!  I've been having lots of fun this week with the new release from Avery Elle and mixing some of the sets with older sets to create a great scene.  I have 3 projects to share as a result so bear with me...

First up is a fun birthday card using the Tough Guy stamp and matching die - the die is particularly brilliant on this set as it cuts out the "inner" bit around his arms which would be tricky with fussy cutting!  I paired it with one of the fun panels from Reverse Confetti's Party Time pack and their double banner die.  The guy was coloured with zig clean color markers.   The quick card panels are really good for making quick cards as you don't need much more to make them pop.

Next I wanted to play with the Japanese set, Konichiwa, as I met my husband on a Japanese course so we like all this Japanese!

I love the versatility of this little set - you can change her expression and the little single flowers mean you can dress up the kimono as I did here - just use a post-it to make sure some of the flowers go over the edge for added realism in the fabric.  As I added the chopsticks to her hair I fussy cut her and popped her up on foam squares over a simple background with the cherry blossom stem stamped onto coloured card and shaded with pencils.  This time I coloured her with the Kuretake alcohol markers.

Finally I went to town on what was going to be a card but I like how it came out so am going to make two more to make a triptych scene for the bathroom and frame them.  Stamps are little works of art in their own right so do think beyond cards!

I really loved the coral reef die in the new release and the fun characters in that bites and thought it would be fun to hide one amongst the coral so that was my starting point for this make.  I die cut the coral and painted them with my gansai tambi (we are waiting for the standard sets to come back in stock at the UK distributor and will then have them for you to go with the starry colours) and added some of the golds over the top for coral like shimmer (really hard to photograph - sorry!)

I used the paints to watercolour a sea like background and left it to dry whilst I stamped and coloured the fish from that bites, the whale from whale wishes and the shark from Hello Chum onto more card and coloured with the clean colour markers again before fussy cutting.  It was then just a case of arranging them onto the sea and stamping a few of the little fish in and around the coral directly onto the background with pigment ink.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

We are not expecting many new arrivals this week with the bank holiday but we will have the first of our two restock deliveries from Altenew later today or tomorrow which includes the first of our large ink pad sets deliveries - not all colours are currently available but we will get them as soon as we can. They are working hard to increase their stock and staff to ship orders so hope we can get things more quickly in the coming months.   Edited Sunday night.   Having just checked off our Altenew stock it is apparent that we are missing 2 boxes and we don't have the one with the invoices in to check it off!  DHL will not deliver now until late on Tuesday so stock will be replenished Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.