Neat and Tangled's 4th Birthday Blog Hop

Welcome to the Neat and Tangled birthday blog hop where we're celebrating our 4th birthday!! You should have arrived here straight from the Neat and Tangled blog where each day there's been a different line up of talented artists working with the latest release - it's well worth your time to go back through all the previous hops to pick up a truck-load of inspiration. And don't forget to read right to the end where I share all the details about the awesome prizes on offer for some lucky winners!

But first, let me show you the cards I've whipped up for the occasion ;-)

Firstly I couldn't help but play with the Little Stinker stamp set with it's cute skunk. I'm pretty sure most of us have felt the same and you'll see so many ways of using this set as you hop along!

I giggled at the different sentiment options and had a hard time choosing which one to go on her little placard there, but settled on this one for now. To go with the theme I stamped a bunch of flower pots from an earlier release Neat and Tangled set called Life is Beautiful to fill in the background.

And the fussy cutting was made easy with the help of the coordinating die which also includes a tiny little heart which would have been fun to cut into the background now that I think about it! LOL!

My second card is fairly clean and simple and would be an easy card to make in bulk for something like birthday invitations I reckon.

It's made easy because the products pretty much do all the work for you! All I did was cut out the Celebrate word in white and it's shadow in black and stick them together. It packs a punch doesn't it?!

And the coordinating stamp set once again gives you lots of options for mixing and matching different sentiments to suit your theme.

To make my background more interesting I took the Lucky Stars die and used it to emboss my white cardstock (rather than cutting them out). I had to stop and think long and hard about whether I wanted to keep all the stars together in one piece or cut them apart. In the end I decided to separate them into about 4 or 5 different pieces with a few stars on each. It allowed me to spread them out more sparsely across the background.

And to finish off I sprinkled some Raspberry Red sequins, black stars and gold mist. I can't help but get a little messy when I create!

My last card today features the Hooray die which instantly made me think of using it as a shaker card decoration and so that's what I did! I cut it in both black and white and glued them together slightly offset to create a shadow effect which makes it really pop off the background.

And to be a little different I created a shaker pocket full of Ocean Breeze, Lime Satin and Shamrock sequins to sit behind it, but didn't fill it up too much because I still wanted to see through the clear window.

Now all the products that I've shared with you today are available in the Neat and Tangled shop HERE and form part of the special birthday mini release. In fact, there's only one other product that I haven't shared with you yet and that's the Doily Tag die... so here it is! So many ideas for this but I simply just ran out of time :-)

Thanks for joining in on my stop of the Neat and Tangled 4th Birthday Blog Hop and I hope you've been inspired today! I have to admit I quite like the look of all the cards sitting together like this. I purposefully kept all 3 of them to a similar colour scheme and I think they would even make a nice set to give away to someone.

And speaking of GIVEAWAYS!!!.......

Neat and Tangled are offering up some amazingly generous prizes to some lucky winners along the hop. Someone is going to win a $100 gift certificate to the shop, and two people will win a $50 gift certificate each. How awesome is that! All you have to do it leave a comment on my blog here today, and/or on any of the stops along the way as the winners will be chosen from amongst the commenters.

Now the next stop on your journey today is the crazily talented Laurie Willison. Click HERE to take you straight to her blog where she's just going to astound you with what she's made!

And a happy 4th birthday N&T!