I can share Rick's birthday card now he's opened it.  I wanted to use the birthday selfies from MFT as I know he liked the images in it, but I wanted to make a bigger card (UK A5 size) so to fill that space I got creative with how I used them to give me space for my sentiments too.

I created one big party scene by stamping and colouring 4 of the selfie squares but then fussy cutting the animals out of the squares so I could arrange them (creatively) to get a bigger scene.  You need to think about your placement - hence why I have the hippo covering the "flat line" on the lions mane - but there are lots of ways you can play with the characters to create a totally different look if you don't always want the selfie idea!  I split the ballons away so I didn't need to worry about the lines - moved them to the top corner (flat bits work that way) and drew the lines back in by hand and I added a third balloon from the giraffe background.  I added a frame using a MFT die - but you could use any frame die you have that fits your scene - we have hundreds of dies to choose from - see the selection here.

The sentiments came from Altenew's Inline Alphabet die - I just spelt out hubster as that's what I call him.   The happy birthday actually comes from a die designed to make a cake - the happy birthday cake fancy die from Hero Arts.   I made another quick card with it whilst I had it out to show you how it's supposed to be used, but I find the sentiment is a really good size to use on its own too and only needs a couple of snips to get it out in 2 pieces.

Here i just took a couple of sheets of paper from the half-lines botanical pad from Waffle Flower, die cut it from the darker and lined it up so the lines continued across the pattern.  I used a pencil to add colour to the candles to make them pop and ran it around the edge of the cake for further definition.  Finished with a couple of dots of stickles.   Super quick but effective so handy for filling your stash or to make a set of simple cards to gift to others (I'm finding people are grateful for cards at the minute so they don't have to queue in card shops)

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• A couple of the ELEVEN boxes of our Altenew order were held up in customs but the last one finally arrived on Friday so we'll be working on adding those this week.   The lightest box is 25kg so as you can imagine - that's a LOT of stock to process!

• I'm still working on Hero Arts - hope to have that in store by tomorrow.

• The MFT mid-month release will be coming with the main release for August - it's not cost effective to buy just 4 items on their own.

That's all this week.

Tara