Chalkboard Teapots with Tobi Crawford

This week’s focus on new stamps from our April Release is our fun Teapot series! Fran has just outdone herself designing regal, elaborate, fun, Fran•táge images fit for inviting the Queen to tea!  Plus, we’ve created Digital Downloads of fantastic phrases, invitations, and all time favorite, classic Stampendous images so you can have tea parties all summer long!  Royal Tea Time 1  and   Royal Tea Time 2  Here, BlogStar Tobi Crawford demonstrates a fun technique to get that trendy chalkboard look with our new teapots. At the bottom you’ll see links to other Teapot images our Design Team have posted on their blogs! Take a look:

Hi there! It’s Blogstar Tobi Crawford here with a quick tutorial on the ever-so-popular

“Chalkboard Technique!”

It’s inspired by the beautiful chalkboard art we now see all over the media, print, and of course Pinterest. What you may not know is that you don’t need stamps that are specifically made for the chalkboard look, and you may not know that it’s super easy!!

Here’s what you’ll need:

Supplies: black cardstock, VersaMark pad, Detail White Embossing Powder, white pigment or hybrid ink, and a stamp. Today I’m using Cling King Teapot and Cling Kettle On. (Not shown: white Sharpie)

1. Step one – stamp teapot with VersaMark and cover with embossing powder. Heat until shiny. Once the embossing powder has cooled doodle a white frame around the teapot with a white Sharpie.

2. Using your finger, smudge some white ink around the image to give the black cardstock that “chalky” look.

3. Cut out the chalkboard you’ve created.

4. Find some fabulous coordinating papers and create a card!

That was easy, right? I just LOVE this chalkboard trend and every time I play around with a new image I wonder if it would look good done with this technique – and this teapot (and sentiment) look fab!  Now check out what other Design Team members have done with these Teapots:

Jamie Martin

(an earlier sneak peek post)

Jamie Martin (new post)

Kristine Reynolds

Artist Elements by Rhea Weigand

Quick Stampendous Note: If you’re going to put “everything but the kitchen sink” on a gorgeous canvas like BlogStar Rhea Weigand has done in this post, you should do it while our website is offering FREE Shipping on retail orders $50 or more shipped to a U.S. Mailing Address!!

Hello, this is Rhea sharing one of my favorite new releases from Stampendous.  I chose to design Artist Elements  on a 5×5 canvas.  This little canvas has everything on it but the kitchen sink.   Layers of tinted Fast Finish, Layers of card stock and bunches of aged embossing powders as well as, Fran•táge elements!!!

Yes, it includes one of my favorite things, tinting Fast Finish Decoupage.  Fast Finish is a thin and fast drying decoupage by Beacon.  Tinting it is easy.  In a small container pour a little Fast Finish.  Put a few drops of dye in.  The more ink the darker the decoupage.

For this project we are going to use.  Dusty Concord, Peeled Paint, Fired Brick and Faded Jeans.

Apply clear Fast Finish to the canvas and the back side of the paper to apply to canvas.

Only use the tinted Fast Finish on the top of the paper.  Tear paper and do a quilted sections covering the canvas.

Stamp the image with Memento Ink

Dry brush color on the image with these Distress colors.  I like to use chalking applicators from JoAnn’s 

Before we start embossing.  Need to cut apart the Make Art from the rest of the image.  Both this sentiment and brushes will need to be layered with matching card stock and attached to the canvas as shown.

Because we are working on a canvas using Boss Gloss and applying with a brush will work best.  Start by doing the edges with Aged Gold

With Aged Marine, Wine, Scarlet, Ochre, Hunter emboss little puddles leading up to and on the tips of the brushes.

Finally add all of the wonderful elements.  Apply Aleene’s Paper Glaze and spread with finger or tip of bottle.  Sprinkle  white mica first.  Here are the elements used:

• Canary color fragments
• Purple color fragments
• Hunter color fragments
• Marine blue color fragments
• Royal blue crushed glass
• Green crushed glass glitter
• White mica fragments

Elements – NEW for April 2013

Our newest Fran•táge images for Spring 2013 are our wonderful new Elements images.  These are terrific collages of various images on one theme. And our Design Team really had a great time with these! Our Phone Elements can create anything from a terrific card to say “miss you! call me!” to a stylish phone message center! This would make a terrific Mother’s Day image as well for those of you with moms who love their phones!

Phone Elements by Kristine Reynolds

Phone Elements by Cyndi Bundy

Phone Elements by Suzanne Czosek

Check out the cool Elements projects our Design Team Members have posted so far this week:

Kristine Reynolds

Lea Kimmel

Jamie Martin

Kristine Reynolds(2)

Cyndi Bundy

Check back tomorrow for more fabulousness with our new Elements! AND – Be sure to check out our May Challenge – we’d love to see you participate! The prizes are amazing!

New Elements and Project Life by Asia King

BlogStar Asia King is back again to introduce this week’s focus – the new Elements stamps in our April Catalog. These 5 images focus on a collage of several elements on a particular theme, the ones she’s chosen to use are the Typing Elements and Phone Elements. These are big stamps, meant to be the focus of most of a card.

W093 Typing Elements

W094 Phone Elements

Since Asia is in the UK, it takes a little longer to get our goodies over to her. So she’s also bringing the Elements into our Project Life event we did a couple weeks ago.  Suzanne Czosek also did a Project Life page that didn’t get included in the original event, so we’d love you to go look at it as well.

Hello Stampendous Friends! It’s time for another inspiration with Asia King . Today I am playing with Becky Higgins’ Project Life. My super talented DT Sisters have recently provided lots of inspirational eye candy for you with their Project Life pages – in case you missed it, be sure to check it out here. Project Life is all about celebrating your every day stuff so I decided to scrap about the thing that ‘happens’ to me every day….(except the weekends! lol) – my job. One of the things I love about crafting is that it’s a way of recharging my batteries after a challenging day. Crafting helps me to ‘leave’ my work behind. So you might say that scrapping about my work would defeat the object lol .

That’s why in my page I wanted to focus on the ‘little’ things I enjoy about my work place, like beautiful aubretias trailing down the wall nearby, sipping coffee from my ‘Best Wife in the World’ mug (given to me by my hubby, just to clarify!) or shopping in the new Polish deli shop at lunch time. But most importantly – all the lovely people I work with whose optimism and sense of humour really brighten my days .

Let’s start with the supply list:

Stamps: Cling Typing Elements, Cling Phone Elements, Cling Blossom Spray, Perfectly Clear Smashing Notes, Perfectly Clear Big Top Type, Perfectly Clear Vintage Lowercase, Perfectly Clear Vintage Uppercase.

Essentials: Aged Wine Embossing Enamel, Aged Ivory Embossing Enamel, Stamp N Bond powder, Sunflower Micro Glitter, White Detail Embossing Powder.

Other: Project Life page protector – Design A, coffee spritzed papers, alcohol ink markers, clear embossing ink, Sepia or Coffee Archival ink, Black Memento ink, ColorBox chalk inks, selection of photos.

1. Spritz some coffee over white card and allow to dry.

2. Cut two panels from the coffee card to the size of your journaling pockets.

3. Stamp the Typing Elements and the Phone Elements onto your journaling cards with brown ink.

4. Stamp Blossom Spray along the edges and in corners with black Memento ink.

5. Stamp the word ‘office’  in Google colours onto scrap coffee papers with a selection of alpha stamps and using ColorBox inks. Add to your photo some additional journaling and a ‘Google maps’ pin.

6. Colour the flowers with the alcohol ink markers.

7. Stamp an accent letter from the Vintage Uppercase set with clear embossing ink and sprinkle the image with Stamp N Bond powder. Warm the heat gun for a few seconds then heat the powder just until it melts.

8. Quickly sprinkle the image with the Sunflower Micro Glitter. Press the glitter with your fingers to aid bonding.

9. Fix the letter to your card with small staples.

10. Sprinkle your cards sparingly with Aged Wine and Aged Ivory embossing enamels. Heat the powders from underneath.

11. Stamp various expressions from the Smashing Notes set directly onto your photos using clear embossing ink. Heat emboss with White Detail embossing powder.

As you can see, these Elements stamps are just perfect for everyday life scrapbooking, especially documenting your office/working endeavours. Their vintage look adds a really quirky contrast against their modern ‘equivalents’ .

Thank you for popping in here today and I hope you enjoyed reading about this project. As always, I’d love to know what  you think!

Happy crafting!

Big hugs

Asia

Flower Power Layout – by Asia King

No need to adjust your computer monitors – yes, I am sharing a scrapbook page again . Hello, Asia here and today I’d like to share two tips with you. First, how to use Fran-tage ‘blinkies’ to embellish your layouts and second, printing your photos on a transparency for a cool 3D effect.

For my layout I stamped several images from the cling Jumbo Spring Bouquet, Violets and Single Butterfly sets. Some were heat embossed with the Gold Detail Embossing Powder and Aged Rose Embossing Enamel. After colouring the images with Inktense pencils I fussy cut them along the flowers from my K&Co patterned papers.

I wanted my photo to have a 3D look, as if ‘blending’ me and my sweet niece amongst all the flowers. To achieve that I printed the photo onto a printable acetate. Printing on transparencies has endless possibilities – just remember to print on the correct, rough side . I then matted my photo with a patterned paper before adhering it to the page on raised foam pads.

On my layout you can see a few different ways of using Fran-tage products for scrapbooking. The Fran-tage beauties do not have to be limited to the encrusted jewel technique. On my page I incorporated them in the following ways:

1. Using Leaf Green Colour Fragments and double sided sticky tape I created a border around one of the paper panels.

2. Next I swiped Boss Gloss sparingly over the green colour fragments and heat embossed it with Aged Rose Embossing Enamel.

3. I sprinkled layers of Champagne Crushed Glass Glitter and Rose Colour Fragments over Beacon’s 3in1 Adhesive  to create a frame for the photo and decorative corners.

Thank you for visiting today and I look forward to seeing you next week!

Big hugs

Asia

Up, Up and Away! – Ballooning to Oz!

One of the most fantastic bits of the new movie “Oz The Great and Powerful” was the amazing Hot Air Balloon trip that Oscar Diggs takes to arrive in Oz. Combined with the cool, steampunk themes in the movie, well, we’ve been so inspired that we just had to have lots of our own!

Dorothy looks out from under a parasol in a very steampunk outfit in our fantastic Overlooking Oz stamp! And Design Team Member Cyndi Bundy did it just soooo cool in almost sepia with a pale blonde Dorothy! Good thing she brought her own shade on her journey!

Overlooking Oz by Cyndi Bundy

Love the way she used the travel themed embossing folder on the brown panel and our Wander Lost stamp on the top! She even used our Blue Encrusted Jewel Technique kit on the bottom corner of the panel! Wow!

Design Team Member Janelle Stollfus gives us a Dorothy with raven tresses and a fantastic Classifieds background.

Overlooking Oz by Janelle Stollfus

But if you really want to swoon… Just take a look at what BlogStar Rhea Weigand did with this terrific image!

Overlooking Oz Sepia Box by Rhea Weigand

Ok, WOW! Just wow! Rhea had better be planning on just sending that on over to Anaheim for little ol’ me! She’s got a whole tutorial for this one over on her blog today! Joining some serious hardware, Rhea used the No Place stamp!

Rhea Weigand

Jennifer Dove

Janelle Stollfuss

Cyndi Bundy

Join us tomorrow for some loveable favorite characters with Lisa Hindsley flair as our Deisgn Team takes on the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Cowardly Lion !

Becky Higgins Project Life – Stampendous Style

Ready to HOP??  Until Sunday night you can comment on the blogs of our participating Design Team Members and our blog here. Each comment counts as one entry to win our Project Life/Stampendous prize package! Prize includes 12 assorted Project Life Page Protectors, and BRAND NEW (so new you can’t buy it on our website until Monday) Stampendous Vintage Alphabet Upper Case and Lower Case Perfectly Clear Stamp Sets. This prize is a $50 retail value! And we’ll give 3 of them!! Uh Huh!! So get hopping and commenting!

Stampendous NEW Vintage Alphabet Perfectly Clear™Stamps

If you’re still messing about with stickers for Journaling Titles… well, you’ve got to have this alphabet. A stamped alphabet means never running out of a letter again! You saw them yesterday on Kristine’s layout. Here they are on a layout prepared for us by BlogStar Rhea Weigand:

Squirrel!

This layout also features Stampendous Smashing Notes Perfectly Clear Stamp set.

Now leave a comment below then HOP on over to these other blogs and leave a comment there as well. We’ll be back Monday with the names of the winners!

Janelle Stollfus

Kristine Fossmeyer

Leadonna Kimmel

Kristine Reynolds

Cyndi Bundy

Tobi Crawford

Jamie Martin

Finally – Remember that our April Challenge is still going strong!! Use Micro Glitter on one of your creations and link it to the F.E. Linus link  button in our right side bar! You’ll be entered to win some of our newest Micro Glitter colors! You can read all the details by clicking on the Challenge link at the very, tippy top of the page or HERE!

We’d also love to see what you can do with Project Life (or similar page protectors) and Stampendous Stamps and Essentials! Send your links to submissions@stampendous.com and we’ll do a follow up post linking to everyone who participated!

Project Life – Even more fun with Stampendous!!

Becky Higgins’ Project Life has taken the craft and scrapbooking world by storm. Lots of folks have embraced the commitment to simply scrapbook one single page or a two page layout of ordinary life per week. A way to celebrate all that is normal and right with your world, or even the special occasions or big events that happen with some normal life in between.  Here’s the Project Life Philosophy -

The Project Life system includes divided page protectors, books for them, and little, pre-printed cards you slip into pockets next to your photos. It’s designed to be easy and quick for folks who think they don’t have the time for more “creative” scrapbooking.

But what if you have lots of stamps, glitter, glue, and creativity? What if you love embossing, Fran•táging, and breaking out all those goodies you’ve collected? Yep, you can use the Project Life approach, too! You can embrace the trend, AND use your stash!!

We asked Becky Higgins to send us some Project Life Page Protectors, and we challenged our Design Team to see if they could document real, everyday life using Stampendous stamps and other products in the little compartments of the Project Life system! It was out of their comfort zone a bit, but we think you’ll be amazed as always at what they’ve created!  Pop over today to Janelle Stollfus’ blog and then come back tomorrow for some more inspiration. Be sure to leave comments and we’ll have LOTS of Project Life Page protectors to send to some lucky winners along with some cool Stampendous products for documenting your everydays and special days!

Janelle Stollfus

Summer of Love

Ok, Carmi Cimicata got me again. You’d think after the fish leather I would have said “no” to her next challenge. “But surely,” I thought, “she couldn’t stump me quite that badly again!”.  Heh heh… I swear that girl is chuckling to herself every time she does this.

Even though I wore bell bottoms and even hip huggers and mini skirts, I’m pretty over the 60′s. But I guess the good folks at Dazzle-It are expecting a revival. So Summer of Love it is. Most everyone else in the hop made jewelry, but cardmaking is what we do.

My box included some GORGEOUS, colorful hemp from Dazzle-It. The colors are fantastic, my only sadnesses were that it doesn’t fit through the holes in the beads and you CANNOT find the end of the hemp to save your life. I had to rip the card to get it off. But it’s perfect for scrapbooking and card making.  So here are my creations! Leave some love and hop on to see what everyone else has made with these fun products! Dazzle It Summer Love Hop

All my Stampendous products used are available at JoAnn Fabric and Craft Stores or on our website at the links!

Here’s what came in my box!

Assembling my card supplies: Fresh Bloom Wood Stamp; Dream Text Wood Stamp; VersaFine Ink, Bazzill Cardstocks

Stamped my Dream Text background. Stamped flower over the top. Colored with colored pencil. Added Micro Glitters in Orange, Teal, Lime, Sunflower with Glue Pen.

I wrapped hemp around the top layer of my card and tied it. Then added beads on narrower hemp string. I secured them with glue dots so they won’t bounce.

My finished cards! They’re very sparkly!

Check out all the Jewelry made with exactly the same products on the Dazzle-It Blog!

Quick and Easy Glitter Tip by Rhea Weigand

Hello, BlogStar Rhea here to bring you another quick and easy tip for Stampendous!  Use your 3D Glue Dots or regular Glue Dots to make glittery flower centers and embellishments.  This inspiration came from my “Bestie” Jennifer Dove who taught this card and oh so simple technique in a class.

This fun, classic flower image is Fresh Bloom, a Stampendous favorite.  You can find it at JoAnn’s and Hobby Lobby.  The sentiment is Beautiful Life.

Most folks buy and use the 3D Glue Dots in a roll.  I prefer to use them as Zots Singles from ThermoWeb.  For this flower center I used Teal Micro Glitter.

Pour out a little glitter and dab your glue dot.  I worked it around to really cover it.

For the smaller detailed dots I used the mini glue dots.

And there you have it!  Not only can you use them for flower centers but try using them for any type of embellishments.  Maybe instead of buttons.  Maybe do the mini’s on a ribbon to make it a sparkly polka-dot.  You can even take thin double sided tape and make a glitter strip instead of ribbon.

Thanks so much for visiting today!  Hugs – Rhea