Love from our home to yours

As we can't get out to see friends and family at the minute, sending our love in paper form is the next best thing.  Getting a card in the post really lifts the spirits more than normal during lockdown too when there is little to break up your day.  So today I have a couple of ways to send a rainbow of love from your house to another with a two-for-one from the Waffle Flower Rainbow Die.

First off, I just used the die as a die cut - you can either cut it from all the individual card colours and then mix up your rainbow order, or do as I did, cut once from white and then use ink or pens to colour each stripe.

I then die cut a couple of different houses from the Mama Elephant Home Collection Die Set using grey pearl card from Lawn Fawn's Shimmer Cardstock Neutrals set.   The sentiments come fromMama Elephant's Holiday Messages set but you'll find a "from our home to yours" in lots of Christmas stamps so check out your stash - I always like to find ways to use my Christmas sets all year round!   That's it - nice CAS design and easy to mass produce if you want to send a few.

For the second version I wanted to emphasise the love in the rainbow so did a stamped version using a tiny heart from Lawn Fawn's How You Bean: Christmas Cookie Add-On Stamp (again if you don't have that exact set, check out your other Lawn Fawn sets - LOTS of them have tiny hidden hearts you may not have noticed!)   This is where the two-for-one bit of the die cut comes in.   The waffle flower die cuts a lovely border shape which can stay as part of the deisgn, be used to just to help you line up the rainbow die cuts, or as I did here, stamped into to get the lines of hearts in the right shape!

I held the die cut in place with some washi tape (dabbed on my t-shirt first to make sure it wan't sticky enough to tear the card base once I removed it), stamped the central heart first then worked my way right and left to the bottom of the rainbow  (I did all the central colours first then held the middle down with tape to keep the rows straight)   I stamped the hearts using Versafine Clair as that's my favourite ink for strong solid stamping but any ink will do the job.

The rest of the card is identical to the first, other than I switched around the houses for a hint of difference!

Hope this is inspired you to send some more cards during lockdown.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

Again - very little news to report this week.   Lockdown measures in the USA mean it is VERY difficult to get any stock.  Our suppliers are in lockdown so they have NO STAFF working for them and are down to manning warehouses normally staffed with 10-30 people with just one person or at best a married couple.   This means that orders are taking much, much longer to process (like weeks instead of days) - I am doing my best to source what I can when I can, but suppliers are further hampered by the fact that manufacturers are also in lockdown so they can't get as much new stock made as quickly as normal either!  Hence Altenew sold out before we could get the new release and we are waiting for more to arrive.   We hope to have the last 3 months of Hero Arts monthly releases as we are now ordering direct and bypassing the UK distribution channel but they have only two people who normally don't do any warehouse work packing orders so hope to get it out by the end of May......

Also, on the home front, as we have so little new stock, and as orders have slumped, we have had no option but to furlough both Liz and now Rick too, so I am doing EVERYTHING myself from ordering, answering emails, dealing with issues, pulling and packing orders to sending the mail out daily too.   So, things may be a little slower here too, especially on a Monday when I have effectively 3 days worth of stuff to catch up on as for my sanity I am trying to not work weekends (other than making stuff and writing this blog post which takes half a day!)

ROYAL MAIL - lots of you are chasing me to ask for tracking information.   There is no point!   Royal Mail's system is not working the way it normally does at the post office are not using point to point hand scanners.   So we only get an update on their tracking system AFTER DELIVERY and no information is available until it has arrived.  

Whilst parcels normally take around 2-5 days to arrive in the UK we are finding that due to issues at sorting offices, staff shortages due to the pandemic and the extra measures post staff have to follow for social distancing they are taking anything up to 2-3 weeks at the moment depending on where you live.   I can't do anything about that I'm afraid.   We are therefore not classing any parcel as lost until ONE MONTH from the date of shipment in the UK and for overseas parcels, not until the world health organization declare the pandemic over and deiveries return to normal levels.  

Sorry if all of that is depressing news, it is a VERY DIFFICULT time to run a store and I am doing the very best I can under a situation that is completely unexpected and impossible to prepare for.   Your patience and understanding is appreciated at this time more than ever.

Thanks

Tara