Every year Stampin’ Up! retires items from the annual catalogue prior to bringing out the new catalogue. There are, apparently, 112 stamp sets on the list (no, I didn’t count them), twenty of which I own so I thought I’d pull some of them out and play. They are also retiring the 2013-2015 in colours to make room for the upcoming 2015-2017 ones. Whilst there is excitement at seeing what will be in the new catalogue, I’m sad to be losing strawberry slush which is my favourite pink. Twenty is a lot of stamp sets but of course it could have been a lot more. This card uses two of my soon-to-be-retired sets, Mixed Bunch and Lots of Thanks.

It looks fairly simple but it took a fair amount of work with ruler and pencil. I made the piece of very vanilla 5 inches across so that each stamp had an inch and I marked the centre of each inch – as well as having a horizontal line. After I stamped them and erased the pencil lines I managed to smear the ink and the lines didn’t erase completely. I’d show you the smeared result but it is now glued to the card that you see in the photo. It’s so useful that there are two sides to a piece of card! This time I had only a bottom horizontal line and vertical lines below it to show the centre of each stamp. I then erased the part of the horizontal line that would be stamped over and tried again. As you can see, no smearing. The ink colours are strawberry slush and sahara sand – a combination I got from another retiring item – the colour coach. The sentiment is from Lots of Thanks – a very useful set. I assume that there will be a replacement.

The sahara sand mat is 1/8 inch bigger in each dimension and is mounted on a strawberry slush base. I dry embossed the envelope flap with spring flowers since it was still out after a class last night.

See you tomorrow,

Liz