I've been playing with one of the new Mama Elephant sets this week - I love to stamp some images in the office then take them downstairs to colour in the evenings in front of the TV.   I tend to use pencils for this so I don't have any inky accidents, so I stamp direct on to my card bases as pencils don't bleed through.   Santa Baby was the perfect candidate for an evening of colouring - small images with big impact and easy relaxing colouring.    What I've done today is use a few different framing tricks to turn those 4 small images into the perfect sized focal point on a 4 x 6 card base.

For the first card I used the easiest trick of all - adding a strip of patterned paper with a die cut frame to pop around the focal image.   I just picked a scrap of paper from my stash that had similar colours to my image (red and green plaid in this case) and then popped my sentiment on the bottom to balance the image.

For the second card I just used two circle dies to create a thin red border frame to site around the image and then stamped my sentiment below in green to draw the eye and keep everything tone on tone.

For the third card I used a fancy die to create the frame - in this case the snowflake medallion die from Hero Arts I used a few weeks ago - but this time I didn't use the circle so it just cuts a fancy frame edge out of a full piece of card.  I just trimmed that to the same size as the card and popped it up on foam tape so the snowflakes cast a shadow.   You could do this with lots of dies and it gives a real edge to your cards over store bought as you'd not find anything like it in a store!

For the final image, I actually stamped that on a scrap of card as I wanted to cut it out - I just used some more tonal patterned paper and covered the whole card so it looked like wallpaper and added a strip of grey skirting board - then it looks like Santa is outside peeking in a bedroom.   I might actually add the bottom of a bed to the bottom left of the card to make a fuller scene....

Hope that gives you a few ideas of ways to make smaller images pop - its a good way to make lots of cards quite quickly which is often handy for Christmas cards I find!!!

NEWS FROM THE STORE

Last week was our bussiest week since before lockdown so we had a lot more orders to pack than I'm used to without packing help.  We finally caught up on packing by late on Friday night so there will be a lot of orders shipping first thing in the morning.   What this meant though was that I didn't get any time to add any more of the new arrivals we'd had.   We have now managed to get those all opened and will start to add them this week but as always orders are packed first as we don't like to keep you waiting for your goodies.

We have the following and will add them when we can (please don't email to ask when - the more emails I answer with "as soon as I can" the less time I actually get to do the adding!):

• Sugar Pea Design's latest releases (not everything was available but we have most of it);

• Reverse Confetti's last two releases;

• Waffle Flower Crafts' latest release;

• Altenew's latest stamp and die release (stencils to follow as its just not possible to get everything at once due to the weekly nature of their releases);

The September release from Concord and 9th has shipped and is due to arrive this week as well.  THERE IS NO COLOR COLLECTION IN THIS SHIPMENT.   The inks were not yet delivered to Concord and 9th due to delays in manufacturing to the increased spread of Covid in the USA.   They HOPE to have it by the end of September so we'll get a separate shipment AS SOON AS WE CAN.  It's not just our order - NO-ONE has it so you are not missing out!

There are also new releases pending for Avery Elle and Stamping Bella - more news of those next week.

Tara