Fixed the Links

Sorry about the faulty links in Tobi Crawford’s Tea Time post. They’re fixed now so you can see Jamie’s great samples!

They’re at

Jamie Martin (older post)

Jamie Martin (newest post)

Elements Images are Elemental!

We know the new Elements images were last week’s focus, but time just got away from us and we didn’t get to post all the links to our great Design Team’s projects for these fantastic stamps! These images make great backgrounds, super focal points, and can be cut apart and layered for super easy, super spectacular cards! When you combine them with our Digital Download phrases - Sew Crafty 1 and Sew Crafty 2 – you’ll have all you need for fabulous cards for Mom, Dad, Celebrating Art, and witty puns that are just our type! Check them out!!

Artist Elements by Stephanie Lee

Sewing Elements by Stephanie Lee

Typing Elements by Cyndi Bundy

Now go see the other great samples they’ve posted on their blogs:

Tobi Crawford

Jamie Martin

Tenia Nelson

Cyndi Bundy

Create Mixed Media Event – May 29 – June 2

We’re extremely excited to announce that we’re going to be a part of the CREATE Mixed Media Event coming soon to Irvine, California.

For 5 days artists from all realms of mixed media creation will visit Irvine for an opportunity to teach and learn a huge variety of craft styles and play with all sorts of projects and products. Amazing instructors will guide folks as they learn metal working, journal techniques, doll making, jewelry crafts, printmaking, mixed media stitching… OH WOW!

On Friday evening an Artist Faire will be open where all sorts of mixed media craft supplies will be available for sale to the public. Attendance at the rest of the retreat is not necessary and there is no fee to enter the Artist Faire and surround yourself with the most delectable goodies imaginable. Stampendous will be there showcasing our Fran•táge Embossing Enamels, Crushed Glass Glitters, Micro Glitters, Mica Fragments, Color Fragments and on and on. Fran Seiford, our Owner and Chief Artistic Officer will be on hand providing a rare public demonstration of the fantastic way these products combine to work with any other mixed media creations and add that special something!  Do join us for this rare treat.

You can find out more about the Artist Faire and about the retreat (there’s still space!) by clicking the logo above! We hope you’ll join us!

Four seasons of Stampendous by Asia King – Part 1

Hello Friends! Your Foreign Correspondent Asia here. Last week I finally felt that Spring was on its way to the UK. Blankets of snowdrops and first shy daffodils were trying very hard to send Winter home . And whilst talking about seasons, I thought I would share this little beauty with you today. Just like the famous composer Antonio Vivaldi, I wanted to compose a concerto of the four seasons – in my own way .

I didn’t want this post to be too picture heavy, so I am going to break it down into two parts. Today I will share the individual pages of my Four Seasons accordion book and next week I will show you the ‘technical’ steps.

So let’s start with… Winter!

I started by waving my baton, errr… the heat gun that is, got the orchestra of Fran-tage powders to tune their instruments, and before I knew it, the music was filling in my craft room…

For my frosty season I used the cling Old World Map and the Suitcase World sentiment stamp. The map was first heat embossed with Silver Detail embossing powder and coloured with Inktense pencils. The sentiment was heat embossed with Black Detail embossing powder. The snowflakes were adorned with Teal Mica fragments and Sky Blue embossing powder. Then I ‘framed’ the sentiment panel with Detail Capri embossing powder and the background panel was Fran-taged with the Aged Teal Embossing Enamel. All these beauties can be found in one magical place – Fran-tage Encrusted Jewel Kit in Teal. (available soon in the US)

Now… let’s cheer for Spring!

And with Spring I bring you a handful of Fresh and Ruffled Blooms, heat embossed with Black (for the foreground) and White Detail (for the background) embossing powders.

The flower centres are all bathed in Champagne Glass glitter and Pearlized Mica Fragments. The background panel has been embellished with the same Mica Fragments and a generous sprinkle of Aged Rose Embossing Enamel. These gorgeous jewels can be found in the Pink Encrusted Jewel Kit.

Now, let’s get ready for…Summer!

Oh, I so love Summer evenings in a garden full of wonderful flowers. Sadly my garden is not very inspiring, so perhaps this gorgeous Seed Catalogue stamp will inspire me to fill my garden with beautiful blooms. Just so I can see the world that will be Beautiful . With the Summer season in mind, I ‘seasoned’ my page with Aged Hunter and Aged Rose embossing enamels and added Champagne glass glitter and Rose Colour Fragments.

And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… Autumn! Or Fall, depending on your point of view .

My Autumnal page is swept with a gentle brush of the Ruffled Butterfly‘s wings and the leaves falling off the trees, dancing in the wind. Can you see all those golds, coppers and bronzes sparkling in the Autumnal sun? That’s the sparkle of the Vintage Mahogany embossing tinsel, Bronze Glass Glitter, Golden Sand embossing powder and Aged Copper embossing enamel – from the Bronze Encrusted Kit. (also available soon in the US)

I hope you enjoyed my Stampendoulicious seasonal symphony . Stay tuned for the 2nd part with the step by step assembling  instructions for the accordion book.

Until then…

Big hugs

Asia

More Wintry Greetings for All

Yana Smakula’s beautifully clear tutorials, great photography, and adorable, doable cards have made her such a fantastic BlogStar. We’re so grateful for all of the gorgeous cards she’s shared with us during her term.  We sure hope some of you are following her blog, even though she’s in the Ukraine, Google is happy to translate her blog to English for you! And we sure hope Yana is going to stay on as a fan of Stampendous and continue sharing our fun stamps with her followers! Thanks so much, Yana, for your wonderful cards and projects and your valuable tips that made better stampers out of all of us! You are appreciated!

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Hi everyone! BlogStar Yana Smakula here!  I think this card for a chilly Winter makes such a lovely girlie card!

For this project I used one of my favourite SSC1148 Kiddo Snow Globe stamp set along with sentiment from a Snowy Short Stacks.

Fast Finish Fall!!

We’re celebrating with our good friends at Beacon Adhesives this week! Beacon has been an industry leader in adhesives for over 75 years. Their generosity to Stampendous has been remarkable. We discovered some years ago making store displays that their ZipDry™ Paper Glue was the only adhesive we could find that didn’t fall apart under prolonged exposure to fluorescent lights in stores. We use Zip Dry for all our samples we send out.  We’re proud to be included on their list of Beacon Buddies

Recently, however, they introduced us to Fast Finish! This amazing decoupage medium drys super quickly (no waiting hours between coats), super shiny, and COMPLETELY FREE OF TACKINESS!!  Yay! We’re so pleased with the results we’ve received on so many surfaces. We know you’re going to love this product, too.  Our designers have prepared some inspiration using Fast Finish and other Beacon Adhesives for a whole week of fun, and we’ll be sending some lucky U.S. address winners (really, we love you internationally, but don’t ask us to export glue) some Fast Finish and some Stampendous goodies.

I’d like to start by showing you a little Fall/Halloween project I came up with using this terrific product. I found this very fun paper mache pumpkin in a local gift store:

And I thought I’d like to cover it with tissue stamped in our CRR147 Cling Lacy Background Stamp. I stamped the stamp all over Kraft colored tissue with VersaFine ink and allowed it to dry. I didn’t worry about the lines between the stamps at all or the wrinkles in the tissue…it gave it a super cool look.

Then I just brushed the Fast Finish on the pumpkin and applied torn sections of the stamped tissue to the pumpkin surface.

Overlapping the sections made it easy to make a cool pattern that looked amazing even close up. As I stuck the tissue to the pumpkin I brushed more Fast Finish over the top to seal and finish it. The Fast Finish dried as fast as I could move around the pumpkin…it was fantastically easy to work with.

I loved the cool look of places where the wrinkles in the tissue distorted the image and where the lines between the stamped images added variety and depth.

My finished pumpkin needed something. Some of our Black Glass Glitter! I  used Beacon Adhesives Dazzle Tac to apply this. It’s really for repairing jewelry, but it has a really fine tip that let me be very precise about glitter placement. I started by covering the stem and applying the glitter by just pouring it on. Beacon makes a lot of adhesives that would have worked for this step.

But then I used the fine tip to draw on vines and leaves and also cover them with the Black Glass Glitter.

My finished pumpkin looked amazing on my shelf of Halloween treasures in my office, but it will also move beautifully into Fall decore. Love how easy and quick Fast Finish made this project. I completed the whole thing in less than an hour. Dry to the touch, not sticky in less than an hour. I let the glitter dry longer for good adhesion.

Now check out the inspiration from our amazing Design Team members for today. You’ll see lots more uses for Fast Finish. Come back and visit tomorrow, too, and all week as we celebrate this great product and all the ways it coordinates with Stampendous stamps! We’ll draw random comments from random blogs to win your own Fast Finish and stamps, so you can try this great product.

Jennifer Ingle (Jingle)

Stephanie Lee (Arty Carty)

Tobi Crawford

Ok… Guess Summer is Over

We do realize that several of you have skipped right past Fall into Winter this last week.  Here in Southern California that’s hard to imagine. We’re only reluctantly able to admit that Summer is over because we just had Halloween. It’s still well in to the high 60′s and even 70′s here. But with the coming of November, we do have to at least acknowledge Fall.  BlogStar Barb Turpin has a fantastic memory of Summer Days Gone By for us today. With the promise that they will come again!

Tomorrow we start a new Challenge for the month of November and we’ll have Winners to Announce from last week’s New Products Sneak Peek week and from the October Challenge. THEN  – stay tuned next week as we celebrate all week with our dear friends at Beacon Adhesives. We’ve all made some amazing projects using their fantastic Fast Finish product. You will be astonished and excited to win some for yourself, so Stay Tuned!

Barb here, playing BlogStar and loving it…my toes, breathing in the freshness of the sea in Oregon…when I gave this to my daughter-in-law she thought the photo came with the frame…hubby said “wonder how it would have turned out if you’d painted your toenails”…me, “they are painted!”

I bought this very plain, slightly damaged photo frame for next to nothing and thought it would be perfect to alter.  I am kicking myself for not taking a picture of the ‘before’!  I stamped the sentiment from Stampendous ‘Breathe’ rubber stamp using Versamark ink and Stampendous Clear Bark Embossing Powder.  I love the way this embossing powder looks in real life…almost looks like fine vinyl.

Excuse the glare, I was having a heck of a time with anything technical this weekend, couldn’t even remember how to turn off the flash in my little
camera…and I know I’ve done it before…AAADD…Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder.

Anyhow, then I used the Stampendous Shabby White Embossing Enamel in the upper corner…it reminds me of sea foam and golden specs of sand.

I found a bag of sea shells at Michael’s and adhered a few to the frame using Beacon Zip Dry™ Paper Glue.  I added a piece of lovely May Arts ribbon in navy.

Brings back memories of our recent trip to the Oregon coast…love the sunsets on the beach.

Thanks for taking the time to visit.

August – Sentimental Focus – WINNERS!

Our August Challenge – Focus on the Sentiments was really fun. Our designers had a great time making the sentiment the focal piece on their cards. Not always as easy as it looks. But our winners did it with style!

Randomly chosen to receive one of three brand new sentiment stamps from Stampendous were:

E. Marie

Barb Housner

Danielle Vincent

If the three of you would kindly email me at submissions@stampendous.com with  your mailing addresses, we’ll get your prizes right out to you in the mail!  Congratulations on your terrific cards! Hope you keep playing along with our challenges!

Just a Note from Asia

BlogStar Asia King brings us a card today with a unique way of Focusing on the Sentiment! Hope you got your entry in for the August Challenge because today is the last day! You can find the linky tool on last Saturday’s post HERE if you still need to upload your project!

>>>>>>>

Hello Friends! It’s this time again – my favourite – Asia’s Stampendous BlogStar time! 

For my inspiration today I decided to drop you all a note…:). A ‘thank you’ note to be most precise! My project today has a masculine flavour with a discrete ‘feminine touch’ – a splash of colour.

Let’s start with your shopping list:

US shoppers: Typewriter Note cling stamp

UK shoppers: Typewriter Note cling stamp

Other supplies: Tim Holtz Lost and Found papers, black cardstock, baker’s twine, scrabble alphas, Tea Dye distressing ink, Black Archival ink, scrap of background paper and… a vintage typewriter!

1. Prepare your card blank from the black cardstock.

2. Cut the main background paper slightly smaller than the base card and distress with the Tea Dye ink.

3. Stamp the typewriter image on your background paper and again on a scrap paper. 

NB. My scrap paper was coloured with distress inks using wrinkle free technique. Then crumpled, swiped with the Tea Dye ink, spritzed with water and then ironed flat for a good measure .

4. Cut out the type writer pages from you scrap paper and adhere to the stamped image on the main background panel.

5. Using a vintage typewriter (or any alternative solution!) type in any additional sentiments to suit the occasion.

6. Fix the panel to the base card with your favourite adhesive. 

7. Cut out a selection of vintage photos from the paper pack and attach to the card as shown.

8. Add the recipient/s’ name/s using scrabble alphas – distress the letters with Tea Dye ink for more vintage look.

9. Wrap the twine for added interest.

Don’t forget about our ‘sentimental’ challenge this month – you still have time to enter!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this inspiration and if you have, feel free to drop me a note! Lol .

Till next time!

Big hugs

Jan Garber Gets all Spooky-like!

I love that BlogStar Jan Garber keeps reminding me that Halloween is just around the corner! It’s absolutely my favorite non-Christmas holiday and every year the anticipation is just huge! This year the Stampendous collection includes some fantastic images that I just love, but Jan is reminding us that last year’s images were no slouches either.

Her Pumpkin Fence here is fantastically embellished with Fran’s Encrusted Jewel Technique using lots of Mica Fragments and Stampendous Embossedy Goodness! This stamp is still a winner, and is still selling well for us! Here’s to Halloween, just around the corner! Jan has fantastic directions for this gorgeous look on her blog HERE.

Pumpkin Fence by Jan Garber