Getting the Most from your Stamp Pad

I taught a class designed to show my students just how versatile our old friend "stamp pad" can be. These are some of the cards they made.

It's so much fun to stretch my creative muscles looking for (or recalling) the very many ways we can add color and depth to our cards with nothing more than the stamp pads we use.

And what I love most about teaching was seeing the reactions and delighted expressions of my students as they discovered these "new" ideas for themselves. It really is the reward at the end of the rainbow.

This first card was done by cutting a reverse stencil of the flower stamp on scrap paper. We tossed out the flower and used the hole, placing it over the stamped flower. Then we sponged color from our stamp pad onto the flower. The layers and subtlety of shading are one of the great benefits of this technique.

Did I say we tossed out the flowers we cut out? Oops! I did encourage my students to use them inside their cards to continue the theme. So pretty!

This card was probably the class favorite. There was a lot to putting it all together, but we learned so much on this card! Too much detail to relate here, but I hope we all learned about thinking outside the box.

I designed this card after I had the parts. My friend, Mary Jane, let me borrow her Cuttlebug and I whipped out the textured pieces to take home and play with. The results were so quick and easy and I think the look is fabulous! Some students were dismayed that the pad left color in areas other than the embossed lines. But then they looked back at my sample and saw that it looked burnished with color- very cool.

Something I don't have a sample of to show you is using the same technique on the back of the embossed piece. Try it sometime.

We did one more card using the water brush with our stamp pads. It's like having a perfectly matching marker. Perhaps I'll post that one tomorrow. Stay tuned!