Good morning and welcome to the first day of sneak peeks for the February release at Taylored Expressions! All of our new products will be available for purchase at 8am PST on Friday, February 4th! I’m super excited to be sharing sneak peeks with you today, but I’m also excited because that means that I’m one day closer to heading back home! It has been fun seeing all the latest new products at CHA, but there’s just something about ‘home’, you know? I miss my sweet kitties and of course, Jon too! The set we’re sharing today is the perfect reminder of home sweet home. I’m thrilled to introduce, Cozy Cottages, illustrated by Nancy McKinney as the newest stamp set in the TE Giving Tree series! If you’re not familiar with the Giving Tree, each quarter we introduce a new stamp set to support a very worthy charity. When you purchase the Cozy Cottages stamp set during the months of February, March, and April, TE will donate $7.00 to Habitat for Humanity!

It is important to note that sets in the Giving Tree Program are the same high quality deeply etched pink rubber on EZ Mount (just like your other TE stamps), however, unlike our other sets you will need to trim these images from a sheet of rubber. This allows us to cut manufacturing costs and donate even more to our charities. If you’ve never trimmed a stamp set before (or maybe you just need a refresher), you can check out my video HERE. Trimming your stamps is easy with the help of a sharp scissors and we hope you’ll agree that supporting a great cause is worth a little extra effort!

Now let me finally get to my project! This set is filled with the most adorable, whimsical houses… a little bit of everything from cutesy to whimsical to fairytale! I stamped the images in Memento Tuxedo Black ink and colored them with Copic markers to match the Tickled Pink patterned paper. I cut the image out with Labels 17 and left the die in place to airbrush the sky and grass. We also have several dies to coordinate with the Cozy Cottages stamp set, but I only used one of them on my project today… one of the clouds from the new Cloud Duo set. We also have a new Picket Fence Border and Whimsy Tree to coordinate with the tree image in the stamp set. Here’s a peek at the new dies that work great with Cozy Cottages:

In addition to new stamps and dies, we also have a little project for our Tiny Chefs to craft right alongside you! It’s a coloring book filled with larger versions of several images from the Cozy Cottages set and a few extras from past popular stamp sets. The high quality coloring book includes ten coloring pages complete with a chipboard base and a gum binding making it a fun and easy flip book for any child! Make sure you hop along to the design team blogs to check out their amazing projects and more pictures of our Tiny Chef Design Team projects too:

• Charmaine Ikach
• Danielle Lounds
• Donna Baker
• Jackie Pedro
• Jodi Collins
• Karen Giron
• Karen Motz
• Melissa Sauls
• Nancy McKinney
• Regina Mangum
• Sankari Wegman
• Tori Wild

Thanks so much for stopping by today! I hope you’ll join us tomorrow for another day of sneak peeks!