A Job Well Done

To my great relief, the project that has been my bane at the office for the last four weeks was finally wrapped up on Friday. To celebrate, I went by a chocolaterie on my way home and bought four handmade pralines to enjoy with a cup of tea. Flavours: champagne, cherry-orange, strawberry-lime and mocha.

Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?

After tea and chocolates, inspiration descended upon me and I made my first multicoloured stamp. I learned this technique from Melanie Testa and Patricia Gaignat at least a year ago, but haven’t tried it before now. There are a number of circumstances why the time was ripe for me to try it now, and here are the top three:

1. Melanie has been making and using multicoloured stamps a lot lately, and has blogged about it, so that whetted my appetite.

2. At the crafts fair that I visited a couple of weeks ago I found double sided self-adhesive film, which makes it super easy to attach craft foam shapes to transparencies. So far I haven’t been able to find self-adhesive craft foam here, so this is the second best thing. What a relief not to have to mess around with glue any more!

3. A few months ago I came across an interesting product called Tack-n-Peel (by Tsukineko). This is a sticky and reusable cling sheet that you can attach to a piece of acrylic. You can then use this print block for unmounted stamps or [...drum roll...] craft foam shapes that are attached to a piece of transparency.

This craft foam, self-adhesive film, transparency and Tack’n’Peel on a block of acrylic combo is a real winner in my world, because these stamps are easy to make, the materials are inexpensive, the transparency backing is a real space saver, and the cling sheet on a block of acrylic gives the flimsy transparency backed stamp stability when needed, AND it creates a transparent print block, so you know exactly where you place your stamp. The advantages never seem to end. I’m sold.

Different parts of a multicoloured stamp. 

Many of these shapes can also be used on their own.

The stamped image

Now I need to think about inkpads. My collection of inkpads isn’t very big, as I haven’t been much into stamping so far. Here’s another blog entry where I discuss stamping. However, when stamp-making has become as easy as this, I might actually catch the pox and start making more stamps. They are after all a great way of trying out ideas in your sketchbook.

PS. Look at these yummy scissors (from Fiskars) that a friend gifted me! Don’t they make you wanna pull out your fabrics and start cutting?