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!

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.

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!