Floral Roundabout

Newton's Nook have introduced a new range of stamps this month - their "roundabouts" with two initial designs - floral and birthday with more in the planning for the future. It's a simple concept - a circular image filled with smaller images to make the shape but it's really fun. You can either just stamp as is and colour the circle or get more creative stamping half a circle at the top and bottom, a bit in each corner of a square or as I have done in this first card, make a whole background.

For my first card I started with a square base card and stamped the floral roundabout in each corner so it just about met in the middle of each edge and created a full background with an empty centre. I stamped the image again onto more white card and coloured the images with pencil crayons. I wanted to decoupage some of the flowers so on the daffodils and purple flowers I just did some base colour as I knew i would be covering them up but you can still see the edges so having the same colour underneath gives a more professional finish. I die cut it with circle die from Hero Arts but they have designed a matching die set if you don't have circles that fit. I stamped the image once more and coloured with purple flowers and daffodils in detail and cut them with some fine scissors and glued them onto the base circle with pinflair gel for dimension. I finished the flowers with a few dots of stickles for a little sparkle and popped the die cut circle in the centre using foam pads for dimension.

I couldn't decide about a sentiment - it's quite a busy card - so maybe it will stay as a general purpose card but I did try a die cut birthday sentiment - what do you reckon? Plain or with a sentiment???

For the second card I did a simple technique - bleeding watercolour with embossing. If like me watercolour painting is not your strongest skill, then this is super easy! I embossed the floral roundabout in platinum onto a decent weight of watercolour paper and loosely added some base colour to the images wetting each flower with a clean damp brush first. I then sprayed the whole thing with a fine mist of water and deliberately let the colours bleed into the circle so you get a soft watercolour background around the embossed images. I let that dry and then painted some more detail over the flowers keeping that layer within the embossing. Finished wih a sentiment from the same stamp using a tonal coloured ink to tie it together. This isn't a card yet as it warped a little so I'll leave it under some books for a day to flatten back out.

Hope that gives you some more ideas on who to use these new roundabouts - check out the amazing samples by the Newton's Nook Design team which I've added to the product images in the store.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

We have some new stock from Altenew and I'm working today to try and get it all in store. This does not include their latest release as I ordered this before they told me about the latest stuff. I will get the latest stuff ordered asap but it's always hard to stay on top of their release schedules. Everything will come eventually but I just cannot keep on top of getting it here in advance as it's not cost effective to order single item releases on their own so I try to do one order a month in normal circumstances.
Our MFT delivery is due tomorrow and I'll do my best to get that in store for the release on Tuesday but I do have to prioritise order packing each day til 4 pm when our post is collected.
Mama Elephant is already here so that will be in store for the 15th.
The latest release from Colorado Craft Company is due to ship this week along with the one we missed in May.
Concord and 9ths new release will ship later this week so should be for next week.
The new colour from Ranger has now shipped along with lots of restocks and should be here by the end of the week customs willing (no alcohol inks as yet as they cannot go by air so I need to find an alternative wholesalre for those) As you can imagine - this will be a fiddly delivery to process - thousands of tiny pads and bottles to count and weigh and check. It will take a day or two to get it sorted so bear with us. Time is the one commodity we can't make more of......
Reverse Confetti's new release should be shipping this week too.
Avery Elle have just announced a release (very soon!) so I need to find time today to order that.
Stamping Bella have also just announced another release at very short notice - I will be trying to get my order in for that too. They have sadly decided to discontinue dies though so sorry if you are waiting for dies to be restocked - they won't be and going forward none of their stamps will have dies to match.