Happy House Mouse - Stamping Tips

• This post is for my niece Elena who is new to stamping, and those who need a few pointers to get the best from their stamps.
• 
• The house mouse is stamped onto a flower design cut from the accent essential cartridge on my Cricut expression, and layered onto a second slightly larger identical shape cut from grey cardstock.
• The flower stamped border is also from the same house mouse stamp set.
• All images were watercoloured, and the central flower covered in glossy accents as a highlight.
• Milled lavender distress ink was used to soften around the edge of the whole topper before 'Old paper' distress stickeles were added for a bit of sparkle.

This short video shows you better than reading a paragraph, the simple yet effective technique of inking a stamp effectively to get perfectly crisp clear images each time you want to stamp.

Unmounted stamps are the way forward these days, whether they are made from the red rubber or the clear material, they both need to be temporarily mounted onto a solid block to allow the image to be stamped. However there are also plenty of wood mounted stamps available too - the main thing in deciding which stamp to choose is of course the image. Those of you who already have caught this addictive crafting bug will know that you are drawn to a stamp instantly the moment you see it, and regardless of how it is mounted if you have fallen for the image you just want to have it !!

I think the main thing I would stress when inking a stamp, with whatever ink you have chosen, is to be patient and apply the ink lightly and carefully, with soft gentle tapping because this way the stamp will not gather ink in 'blobs' and it will only ink the image and not the surplus rubber around it.

To stamp ideally it should be a fairly solid worktop, and it is best you position yourself above the stamp to ensure even pressure (more important for those stamps that are larger than your hand). Be confident as to where you are going to place the stamp, and as soon as it has made contact with the paper keep applying the firm (but not too hard) downward pressure always keeping one hand on the stamp to prevent it slipping. Pressing the stamp too hard to the paper will effectively squash it too much and you will probably have a blurred image.

To remove lift the stamp directly up, again this ensures there is no blurring. With practice this will become second nature.

Distressed Happy Birthday

Card recipe

Paper Artsy stamps

Distress Inks (pumice stone, victorian velvet, crushed olive, aged mahogany)

Alcohol Inks (meadow, cranberry, sandal)

Distress Stickles (old paper, frayed burlap, peeled paint)

DCWV adhesive ribbon

Text peel off

Dragonfly brad

Cuttlebug embossing folder

Karen Fosters scrappers floss

To make the flower I stamped out the 2 flowers paper artsy stamps with the distress inks and cut them out. Because they are 2 slightly different sizes they nest together really well. I distressed each cut flower further with the pumice stone ink (a really useful colour that ages paper really well, see the embossing on the card for an idea). I then cut a slit about 1.5cm at the natural places to create the flower petals before curling them slightly with scissors and fingers, to give dimension. To layer i placed the stamped flowers on top of each other along with a peach prima fabric flower (from my stash), a pink button and tied it all together with a few lengths of Karen Fosters scrappers floss (tinted with aged mahogany distress ink)

This has turned out to be one of my favourite cards I have made recently. It incorporates most of the new 'goodies' I bought from from recent trip to the Make It craft show in Farnborough. It was the first time that Mum and I had visited one of these much talked about shows, and it lived up to expectations. We met up with 2 seasoned show attendees (mums crafty sisters) and had a whole day of pure self indulgent shopping!!

Entered as part of the 'Distressed' challenge on 2sisterschallenge blog site.

Why I started this blog

This blog was inspired by three generations of crafters in my family, and a way for us all to share our creative makings with each other because we live in 3 different countries