Stampin' Terri!

Open House Winner!

Just a quick update tonight to let everyone who was at my open house today,  know who the winner of the door prize was.....

The winner was Lorrie Jaster from Spruce Grove!   Congratulations Lorrie!  I'll be in touch to make arrangements with you to get you your prize!

Lorrie won an "At Home" Simply Scrappin kit, a Bold Brights embossing stack, a pack of magic mesh, Delight in Life stamp set, a pack of stampin dimensionals and a pack of Bold Brights assorted paper! 

Watch my site in the next few days for a listing of all the retired stamp sets I have left :)

-Terri

Convention swapping!

I am attending my 3rd convention next week and my favorite part thing about convention (next to the girl time away from home!)  is swapping!   I signed up for 8 swaps this year which is double what I did last year.....I must have rocks in my head!  Anyways....I am almost done, just one more to go, but I thought I'd give you a sneak peak at the one I finished last night! 

This is for my technique swap .... the main image is stamped on a polished stone background.  You can see my polished stone tutorial here.   Once the background was dry, I stamped with the new Baroque Motifs set using Sta-zon Ink and then set it with a clear acrylic finishing spray.  The finishing spray is a very important step...without it the gold ink tends to want to rub off.  The main card base is made out of the new In color Wasabi green on to which I layered chocolate chip and a piece of  Brocade Background designer paper.   The crimped piece is made out of a 1 1.4" wide strip of river rock cardstock that I ran through my crimper.  I attached it with sticky strip because it really wanted to fall off of there, lol....you gotta love sticky strip....you get ONE chance with that stuff and if you don't stick it right the first time....FORGET about moving it!  Ask me how I know...lol... I finished the card off by adding a hunk of chocolate chip grosgrain ribbon and two gold brads.  In case you are wondering how I get my brads to line up so perfectly....let's just say my piercing guide is very well loved! 

Only 8 more sleeps until convention!!

Using the spiral punch with the 5 x 5 art journal

Here's a tutorial that I printed and gave to my Stamp Out Breast Cancer fundraiser participants this year.  It really helps so that you can line up the holes properly when you want to decorate the cover.  The pictures were by Patti Bennett, I can't remember where on the internet I found them.   

Click on the link below to download the printable version with pictures!!

          

Step 1: insert 5.25” square paper into cutter at 1/8” mark, close arm and make a ¼” slit

                     

Step 2:  Note where you need your spiral punches to be, sometimes you have to turn the paper over to punch using your slit made in step 1.

Step 3:  Insert paper so that small slit fits over the “pin” guide inside the punch and punch the paper.                     

Step 4: Continue punching down your edge as shown, but when you get close to the end, notice you’ll want to stop and back up ONE hole so that you don’t punch off the edge.  Notice the center of the punch in the photo is hollow, no paper to punch, because I inserted the punch to just punch one last hole. 

Step 5:  Place adhesive on the back of your designer paper, and start applying it at the opposite side of the spiral, ending at the spiral you use a bone folder to press the spiral punches down in between the spiral.

Step 6:  Use a Sanding block to sand the edges of the cover to smooth the edges of the paper.

Download tips_for_using_your_spiral_punch.doc

Bleaching can be beautiful!

Wow...it's been a while since I posted!!   That's the bad news....the good news is that I was working my butt off to qualify for cruise since I was so close.....and I did it!  I crawled across the finish line on June 27th!  So, I am very excited about that since it's my first time!  You'd almost think I was talking about......well never mind, Lol..... my mom reads this!

Here's a bleaching card that I did with my downline last month, there are two techniques on here. 

The first technique,  after stamping with the canvas background stamp with old olive ink onto the olive cardstock, I stamped the leaf from the On Gossamer Wings (now retired) by stamping it directly into a piece of folded up paper towel that I had soaked in bleach, then onto the cardstock.  You'll want to make sure you clean your stamp right away after using bleach this way ....I'm not sure if it would damage the rubber or not but why take the chance!

The focal piece done with the flower is bleached as well.  I first embossed the image using black craft ink and black embossing powder.  Once that was dry, I painted in the inside of the image with my aquapainter which I filled with bleach!  Make sure you dump out the bleach when you are done, I can't imagine it doing your aquapainter any good and besides...bleach degrades when it is exposed to light and won't work anymore if you leave it in there.

You can wait for that to dry naturally OR you can speed the process up by gently heating it with your heat gun.....I opt for heating :)   Be careful that you don't overdo it though because the embossing with burn.  Once it's completely dry the neat thing about removing the color is that you can add whatever new color you want using crayons markers or whatever!  Just make sure it's dry first...speaking from experience, I used a marker too soon once and bleached the tip of my marker!  Yikes! 

To finish this card off I added white organdy ribbon and black brads, however one of my ladies that night used black organdy ribbon and it looked smashing!  (I hate it when they show me up...lol...just kidding ladies, I actually love it when you all think out of the box!)  The focal piece is then popped out with dimensionals :) 

I hope you enjoyed this card, I promise not to neglect my website for so long again!

-Terri