Category Archives: stamping

Mar21

Turning Techniques into Pages

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Turning Techniques into Pages

As I said on Monday, I love techniques. When my local stamp store was open, I took tons of classes, which gave me the confidence to experiment with all sorts of tools and techniques. Then the store closed, so no more classes. One of the things I’ve found important, something that really fuels my creativity, is that I’ve got to be bringing in new ideas and techniques on a regular basis. What was I going to do without my local stamp store?

Enter the True Scrap online classes that Lain Ehmann started. A dozen live, web-based classes over a two day period, filled with tons of inspiration and information. This was how I could bring new ideas into my technique repertoire!

Nic Howard’s Touch Me! All About Texture from the first True Scrap event, was a treasure trove of new ideas. Use gesso as a background. Roll the edges of your papers. Make your own flowers. Use ink and paint to create visual depth, and distressing and dimensional products to build a tactilely appealing page. This is one of the pages I created based on what I learned from Nic’s class. Love the combination of textures and layers!IMG_4597

Julie Fei-Fan Balzer had an amazing class called Dirty Fingers, Clean Design at True Scrap 4. She used stencils, mists, paints, hand carved stamps to create backgrounds and patterned papers for scrapbook pages. This was my first attempt with those techniques. While it’s not perfect, I really enjoy it, and it has pride of place on my vision board.
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Do techniques inspire you too? There’s a new, free technique class tonight, and it’s not too late to sign up. Lain Ehmann will show you how to get the most out of your stencils, templates, and masks in Template Tantrum. Sign up, and check it out! If you can’t make the class tonight, you can watch the replay for free for about a week after the event. You’re sure to be inspired! Join me. It will be fun!

Mar18

Technique Love

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Technique Love

When I started my craft journey, I began as a rubber art stamper. I love getting messy and trying new techniques. There’s something about trying to achieve a certain look visually that’s so rewarding. When I started scrapbooking, I brought that love with me. But at the time, techniques were not very popular in the scrapbooking world. Paper piecing, yes. Alcohol inks on embossing? Not so much.

Alcohol ink on clear embossing. Ahead of my time!

Alcohol ink on clear embossing. Ahead of my time!

Nowadays, scrapbooking trends have embraced the technique laden page. Misting? A must-have. Paint? Sure, why not? Stencils and masks? Yes, please! Turning scrapbooks into Art Journals? Simply inspiring.

Sometimes, these techniques can also be intimidating. Once again that fear of “ruining” a page rears its ugly head. The thing is, it’s only paper that gets ruined. The memory, the story? You still have that inside you, ready to be told.

There are some great classes out there to help you get over the fear, and help you embrace your creative side. I’ve taken some wonderful classes through Lain Ehmann’s True Scrap events, and they have definitely helped me broaden my horizons, technique wise.

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Nic Howard’s Touch Me! All About Texture was so much fun! Nic is the master at layering, clustering, and adding interesting textures, both physically and visually. Her class gave me the confidence to create pages outside my comfort zone, with lots of embellishments and techniques.

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Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s Dirty Fingers, Clean Design class is a treasure trove of messy techniques. Paint, misting, stencils, and hand carved stamps all make their way into her class, and onto the pages she creates. I have had so much fun making pages using these techniques.

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Erin Basset’s Art Journaling 101 class is a visual treat, with a ramble through her art journals, and a demonstration of how she creates a page. I haven’t finished the art project she inspired, but as soon as I find a book or two that I won’t feel guilty about destroying, I’ll be playing with the techniques she demonstrates.

Still nervous about techniques? I’ll show you some of the pages I made based on these classes later this week.

These classes will help you find the confidence to play with art supplies. Want to check out the quality of the classes before buying any? There’s a new technique class coming up this week, and it’s free!

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Lain Ehmann dug out her templates, masks and stencils, and made them work triple duty! I’ll be taking this class on Thursday, and adding the techniques Lain demonstrates to my repertoire. Join me? It’s free, and will be a great way for you to test drive the True Scrap class environment.

 

 

Dec21

I Make Mistakes. Regularly!

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I Make Mistakes. Regularly!

One of the excuses I frequently hear is “I’m afraid I’m going to ruin ___.” Sometimes it’s a piece of paper. Sometimes it’s a photo. Sometimes it’s even the memory you’re trying to record.

Well, I’m here to tell you, sometimes you will mess it up. And that’s okay. Sometimes you’ll have to start over. Sometimes you’ll be able to turn your mistake into a happy accident. Sometimes you’ll just throw it in the circular file, and never look back.

The thing is, you can’t let a mistake, or the possibility of a mistake, keep you from doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’m sure you’ve learned this in other aspects of your life. Now I’m asking you to apply that mindset to scrapbooking.

Let me give you an example from my own experiences:

I have been stamping for a very long time. Luckily, while there wasn’t a local scrapbook store when I first started scrapbooking, there was a local stamp store, whose owner was also a wonderful teacher. I learned a lot by taking her classes. One of the most important things I got from her classes was that by knowing your materials (inks, papers, textures, etc.) you could minimize stamping mistakes. (I’ll have a .pdf and short video about avoiding common stamping mistakes available for anyone who signs up for my mailing list, once I get that up and running.)

I used to teach EK Success’ Scrapbook Design University at my local JoAnn’s. Each week, I’d bring in sample pages, and my album covers were getting ruined by the mess left behind by the Wilton students. No matter how much I cleaned, I still managed to get frosting on my linen albums.

I decided I needed an album dedicated to the class, so my personal albums wouldn’t get ruined. I had a post-bound album I had bought at JoAnn’s, but it was UGLY. I decided I’d stamp on the cover to try to pretty it up. It had a smooth, non-porous surface, so I decided to use staz-on ink, which is permanent and dries quickly, even on non-porous surfaces. I also had a bottle of staz-on stamp cleaner, so I was sure I’d be able to wipe off any mistakes I might make. I also knew that since the cover was smooth and almost slippery, there was a higher than average chance I’d mess up an image, but the album was so ugly I figured I couldn’t make it any worse. 😉

Sure enough, the very first image I stamped, my hand slipped, and I blurred the image. I got out the cleaner to wipe up the mistake, and all it did was smear the image some more.

I wasn’t expecting that!

I sat back, and considered my options. Forget about the whole thing, and use a different album? Keep going and hope I didn’t slip while stamping any more? Or decide that the smear wasn’t a design flaw, but a feature?

Of course I decided to turn my flaw into a feature. I continued with my stamping, and after I stamped each image, I smeared it with some more cleaner.

Here’s the final product:

100_5998Sort of interesting, in a good way, right?

The thought I want you to take with you as you begin your scrapbooking journey is this: You WILL make mistakes, and you CAN find solutions for any mistake you make. Embrace imperfection. It makes life (and your scrapbooks) much more interesting.