New Alpha Bears sneek peak

Hello lovely peeps

Lili of the Valley have some fabulous new NovemBear stamps coming out this month, including a full alphabet set which I have used to make this door hanging.

To tie in with the upcoming launch the theme for this month's challenge on the Lili of the Valley Facebook page is

B is for ....

Just make something with a LOTV image featuring Bears/Bunnies/Babies/Balloons etc for the chance to win one of three vouchers to spend at the Lili of the Valley shop.

So, onto my make...

To cover my chipboard hanger I used a paper from the Winnie in Wonderland CD by Polkadoodles.

First I taped the paper right side up on my glass mat with some low tack tape and then positioned the hanger where I wanted it. I used a pencil to draw in where the hole would be

then placed my EK Success Circle Scissor Pro over the top

The hole was 1 15/16" across so I followed that mark around whilst rotating the tool to make sure it was lined up properly before cutting.

After cutting the hole I turned the paper over and drew in where the outline of the hanger was (note that although it doesn't look like it, the picture is of the back side of the paper - it came out too yellow on my first try at printing it so it's printed on both sides)

I covered the hanger in Mod-Podge and placed it face down onto the back of the paper, lining up the holes and pencil outline. I trimmed off the excess with a craft knife and sanded the edges to neaten.

To print the bears I imported them into Craft Artist so I could easily size them to fit the space available at the bottom half of the hanger - it has a 'Custom' setting for project size, in this case 9x16cm. You can see that I have the A and V bears overlapping so that one is standing on top of the other - I saved the A as a PNG file in Irfanview before importing it to get rid of the white background so all of the V would be visible behind it.

I printed off the Alpha Bears onto Super Smooth 120gsm paper and coloured them in with Promarkers (Walnut, Cocoa, Cinnamon, Tan, Putty, Blender). I printed them again onto patterned papers (One Birdie Lane pad from LOTV/Nitwit) and cut out just the letter parts to paper piece over the top.

After glueing the bears in position on the hangar I added die-cut clouds (Joy Crafts)

 and drew in wires to hang the top bear from.

I painted the whole thing with a layer of Mod Podge to seal it then added a dotty organza bow.

 I would like to enter this in the following challenges:-
My Time to Craft #358 paper piecing
Incy Wincy Designs - Not a card
Make My Monday - #58 anything but a card
Inky Chicks #90 animals
Crafty Catz #391 beartastic
Colour Crazy Challenge #44 Anything Goes
As You Like It Challenge Christmas or not Christmas & Why (Non-Christmas - I don't give out many Christmas cards so I'd rather make birthday cards or gifts that I can give to friends and family for their special day)

Thanks for stopping by,

Katrina x