"Out Of This World" Customer Service

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the ever changeable Autumn weather. Autumn is probably my favourite times of the year, I love to see the leaves change colour and find lots of inspiration from the warm oranges, browns and red leaves that carpet the streets. Another reason I'm fond of Autumn is it's my birthday season, my lovely husband is planning on giving me some money for craft stuff so I shall be having a splurge in the next week or two. I've already had a bit of a splurge on my own behalf and ordered the Kuretake Gansai Tambi Japanese Watercolour Paint Set - 36 Colours from Amazon, it's on its way from Japan at the moment which is rather exciting! The seller (Snow Drop, Japan) even sent me an email explaining that as the paints are delicate,they've opened it and put an 'air pocket' inside to protect the paints - isn't that nice of them?

The reason for this post isn't just about boasting about my new paints to be (sorry about boasting) but to highlight the brilliant service I got from Clearly Besotted Stamps. I ordered some stamp sets from the company last week as they've got a sale on at the moment and as regular readers will know I LOVE Clearly Besotted Stamps, there's been a couple of stamp sets I've wanted for a while now including the animal balloon set which is really cute and all over YouTube and a set called "Out Of This World" which is an alien/monster themed set. Neither set were in the sale (not that I expected them to be) but I managed to resist the new release stamps (go check them out - there's a good mixture of cute and more traditional - there's even a really funny set that I was tempted by!) so I decided to get them both as I'm fairly sure I'll get lots of use out of them. I don't tend to use my new stamps straight away so they remained in their packaging until yesterday. I noticed on Facebook that a friend's son is celebrating his birthday soon so decided to make him a card using the alien stamp set. One of the stamps included is a moon surface so I knew I needed to stamp the chosen alien first, mask it off then overstamp with the moon. However when I stamped the alien the side of its 'foot' was missing, I thought it was maybe part of the design as open drawn images were popular for a while (not my 'thing' as I wouldn't know where to colour to) but it turned out that part of the stamp was missing.

Alien with a poorly foot 

I emailed Clearly Besotted Stamps last night and they emailed me back this morning to apologise and to let me know that they're sent a replacement stamp set which hopefully I should get tomorrow! I did manage to save the image by going over it with a black pen but as I don't have a very fine line pen the alien looked really chunky on top of the moonscape so I had to go over that too. My hand slipped while outlining the eye so I covered it up with a wobbly eye. Below is some photos of the finished card including quite a few close ups because the card is A5 and some of the colouring doesn't show well on the long view.

Out of this world card

Close up of birthday alien and sentiment - love the font

Main image with meteor shower starry background

Flying Saucer image - my favourite stamp

Wobbly eyed alien

Please excuse the photo quality, I couldn't take a crisp image for some reason. Originally the background was just white dots but I gave the card to my husband Chris so he could hold it close to his eye which has some sight and he accidentally smudged a couple of the dots which hadn't dried thoroughly (serves me right for not checking!). It turned out to be a happy accident though as I liked the shooting star look so deliberately smeared the rest. The main image is matted onto some silver holographic card which I debossed using a Crafter's Companion 'Angelina and Friends' boy embossing folder called "Starry Eyed". Not much of it shows around the topper but I like the effect of the debossed stars.

I really like the cartoon images and I hope Liam does too. I'm not sure how old he is but I think this card is one that is suitable for all ages. Damaged stamp aside, this is a brilliant stamp set with lots of images and sentiments and it even has a couple of sentiments suitable for Halloween and at £9.00 not a bad price either as the stamps are (usually) of a very high quality.

I hope you like my little card share, I will be sharing the card I made for my niece's birthday in the next day or two (she turns 17 tomorrow). As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx