Reggae Retirement

One of my friends is in the fortunate position to be taking early retirement this week so I needed a retirement card.  She's a reggae fan so Oddball Bob from Stamping Bella was the perfect choice!    What I love most about our hobby is that you can pretty much always find the perfect image for your recipient for any ocassion.   The standard deck chair in the garden you find in the shops wouldn't cut the mustard here.

I tried a few backgrounds from sunsets, patterned papers and rainbows but I settled on something much more CAS in the end.  Bob is very colourful so he really didn't need too much in the background or he didn't pop.   I used the Confetti All Around stencil from MFT and just colour blended orange and yellow to make it shine.   The sentiment is one of 3 that comes with Bob and it works well for an early retirement - no more Monday morning alarm calls really does mean she'll be living the life she loves!

For the image itself I coloured him on kraft card with polychromos and prismacolor pencils.  I like to use pencils on either greyboard or kraft as I find the pencils have more bite that way and blending (using stumps) is easier.   As Stamping Bella no longer make dies to match their stamps, there isn't one for Bob, but its still pretty easy to cut him out as if he were die cut as long as you have sharp pointed scissors and a craft knife (I favour the finger knife as I find it easier to control like a pencil).  I cut around leaving a small border like you would with a die, as this makes fiddly bits (like on the guitar) easier to cut out, but you can follow the lines too if you prefer.   If you don't like fussy cutting you can just mask the image and stencil a background over the top too.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

We should have the latest release from MFT in store on Tuesday along with the items from the last kit (no kits themselves this month as they sold out).   We have quite a few restocks this time too.

We ordered over 520 items from Altenew a couple of days ago.   This covers this weekends release, all the items we've missed since Christmas (bar a few that are still out of stock that we're waitlisted for) and quite a large number of restocks this time too.   It usually takes them around a week or 2 to process orders so hopefully we'll have it soon.

We've ordered the upcoming releases from Mama Elephant, Concord and 9th, Reverse Confetti, The Greetery and Waffle Flower crafts.   Again awaiting shipment dates.

We have a large restock order in to Lawn Fawn but are were inundated with orders for the new release and are still playing catch up - as yet no shipment date for our order so we don't know what has and hasn't sold out.

Diecuttable felt is now back in stock.

We've now found a new Kuretake stockist so have a few items back in stock - gansai tambi watercolor paints, two way glue and sketch pens.   We also have a few new items too - the newer opal tambi colours and some fun pens that create dots in different sizes just by the amount of pressure you apply.

We have Tsukineko restocks too so all the colours of Versafine ink pads are back in stock.