Today, we’re going to be looking at the results of finally opening up the Memory Essentials Get Rollin’ package.

What’s inside?

A green-handled, clear wheel with a layer of sticky stuff (that’s the scientific term) covered by a piece of plastic. The plastic acts as a cover to keep random things from sticking to your wheel before you’re ready to use it, much like the covers on the cutting mats for the Cricut or Silhouette.

Once you take off the plastic cover you can add any unmounted stamp you like to the wheel. A not necessarily obvious caveat–you want your stamp surface to be even, so try to choose stamps with similar thicknesses. You wouldn’t want to use a thin rubber stamp with one that’s got a foam cushion on it. You’ll end up with missed spots on your final project.

I started out with a stamp set from Fiskars’ Heidi Grace line, with a single border stamp and a word and flourish. After inking it up well, I rolled the wheel across a piece of smooth white cardstock.

If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that there’s a definite line where the top layer of ink transfer stopped, and only residual ink made it onto the page. This is a 12×12 page. An 8.5×11 page would probably not run out of ink like this page did.

I tried again, this time using a pigment ink instead of a dye ink. No appreciable change in transfer clarity, but I definitely was having trouble keeping the wheel straight up and down, and stamping complete images. That’s how I knew it was time to stop making things last night. Another thing done, to minimize that annoying change in ink amount, was to switch the starting sides for each roll of the wheel.

Finally, this morning I tried with some flower stamps from Close to My Heart, and a tricolor stamp pad from Brilliance. Once again I switched starting sides for each roll of the wheel. There’s a little over lapping here, but all in all, not a bad background.

Any ideas on what to make with any of these papers? Feel free to suggest something in the comments. I think I’m just going to sit here staring at them for awhile.