by Jackie Bultje | May 18, 2019 | baby cards, Birthday, Blends |
Hello stampers. Do you like colouring? Do you hate colouring? Beautiful Blends are the answer. If you love colouring then you will love it even more when you colour with Blends. Do you hate colouring? You just might be very pleasantly surprised if you try the Blends. How do I know this? I think I have now had around 50 Blends club members as well as people at my coffee and a card classes say that they hated colouring until they tried the Blends. That just makes me so happy. Did you know that when I was in grade 2 I won second prize in a colouring contest run by the Guelph Daily Mercury? I was so happy! My prize was a dozen tulip bulbs and this was a kids colouring contest. How silly is that? Anyways, even with that legacy, colouring can still stress me out sometimes especially if it is a really detailed line image stamp. But Blends are different. Try out a few and you will see what I mean. I would like to show you two cards we made at our last Blends Club. Both of them are using stamp sets that will soon retire, so if you love them, be sure to add them to your collection before they are gone and sell for an astronomical price on Ebay.
Now doesn’t this card just make you smile? Two by Two is great for baby cards but also for birthday cards or get well cards for kids. It is also perfect for colouring therapy. I used flirty flamingo, balmy blue, soft suede, smoky slate, daffodil delight, pumpkin pie, basic black, real red, crumb cake, old olive and pool party to colour this card. I think it is a winner. I used the stamparatus to make sure my sentiment was a beautiful, deep black.
Bubbles and Bubbly just recently made its way to my house. This bathtub looks a lot like mine, and with a saying like that, don’t you think The Pampered Stamper needed to own this set? I thought so too and just in time too since it is retiring at the end of May. I layered vellum over top of the pool party circles to soften it up a bit but you could also use our sequins for a fun look. I am sure there are not too many rich razzleberry bathtubs in the world but I like the funky look of it.
Thanks so much for stopping by and get ready for six more Blends colours coming in the new annual catalog: so saffron, gray granite, pretty peacock, seaside spray, rococo rose and purple posy. Have a super day.
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by Jackie Bultje | Feb 8, 2018 | baby cards, Sweet Little Something |
Hello stampers! Sorry for my long absence. Today I want to talk to you about our beautiful new bunny stamp called Sweet Little Something. It is the same style of artwork as Baby Bear but it is a little bit cheaper as the sayings are a smaller font. Sweet Little Something has 10 photopolymer stamps and costs $26 while Baby Bear has 12 and costs $32. Both are three step stamps. This may have been a turn-off for some people because it can be a bit tricky to line them up perfectly even though they are photopolymer stamps. With the new Stamparatus coming soon this is no longer an issue. I used the Stamparatus to make my cards and I love it so much!! You can make multiple cards in a fraction of the time with no errors. If the image turns out too light or patchy, you just ink up again and the Stamparatus guarantees that it will line up perfectly. Here is a link to a video on how the Stamparatus works. If you have not pre-ordered one in December you will have to wait until the new catalog goes live on June 1. It will retail for $65.
Besides the Stamparatus, another trick with three step stamping is to start with the smallest, most detailed image first. You want to stamp that one in your darkest colour. The second stamp should be the one with a little more detail and a medium coloured ink. The third stamp should be your broad background image that fills in the rest of the colour and this should be your lightest coloured ink. Here is a graphic to make it more clear.
I’m not sure what happened to the middle bunny, he is a little mottled, I must not have cleaned him properly before stamping, but you get the idea. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two detailed stamps, so my trick is to remember that the first one to be stamped has two clear eyes. I also found that I had to trim my stamps between the legs and under the arms to prevent lines or blotching. It hasn’t seemed to damage the stamp and you can see in the third image that I could trim a little closer, there is a bit of a line that I don’t want to be there.
Here are some sample swatches that I made. This is another great idea to do since you will forget which colours you used and have to do a lot of guessing and recreating to find that combination back. You will notice that one of the swatches is left blank. Yup, I forgot what I used on that one and it is one of my favourites!! Go figure.
You can also see that I definitely had inky fingers while doing this! I am quite in love with this little guy, and yes, I refer to the bunny as “him” since he reminds me of my grandson Leo. Did you know that there is a classic children’s book called Leo the Lop? It is all about a bunny just like this one. Here are the cards I have made with this adorable stamp set.
I know that Corduroy was a bear, but that must have inspired me to use the corduroy ribbon for the rabbit. Combined with the True Gentleman paper it really looks nice. Here is a close-up of the Sweet Little Something bunny:
As much as I love this masculine rabbit, she is also adorable in powder pink. I used the embossing folders from the Petal Palette suite to add some texture to these simple cards.
For this card I used powder pink as the third and final colour along with soft suede and chocolate chip. I inked up the Petal Pair embossing folder with powder pink before running it through the Big Shot.
Using this year’s in colours reminded me that I had an unopened stash of premade bitty bows. It’s a little big for her, but it reminded me of those huge bows little girls used to have in their hair in the 1930’s and 40’s. So while we are on the subject of in colours, why not use tranquil tide as well?
For once I don’t have a video to share with you. My trusted videographer, Rachel is being a nanny this week, so she is not home!! I hope you enjoyed the different versions of my lop-eared bunny as well as the simple tips and tricks to make stamping with him easier. Have a super day!!
