Stamperia have come out with some gorgeous vintage and steampunk paper collections. I’ve been working with four of those collections for my latest mini album, which I’ll be showcasing here soon.😃
In the meantime I’ll be showing you some smaller projects I’ve been working on with said papers.
Take this cutie. Since I love to send a friend some tea – kind of a hug-in-a-mug – I created this lovely little Tea Booklet. For its front, back & spine I made use of a pre-imaged paper sheet Stamperia provided in their Lady Vagabond collection.
I matted the inside of the booklet with some beautiful patterns and decorated with some fussy-cut elements.
Added some Glossy Accents by Ranger for a shiny highlight
My spine was 5/8″ (1.5 cm) wide to accomodate a bag of fresh tea. You can make the spine as wide or as narrow as you need. The narrower the spine, the easier it fits into a normal envelope. However, if like me you’d like to send out some tea, you’ll need a little width.
Have you ever created a tea card? I’d love to know you ideas!
I already knew you could stamp over a painted or inked background. But what if you want to stamp a light color, like white or cream, and you don’t have opaque inks? You could stamp with paint of course, but what if you want that grungy blended color gradient effect? Stamping with (white) paint over an inked background would only give you clear and harsh boundaries between the stamped image and the background.
Fortunately there is a third way, which I’m sharing today in my blog. I got it from one of Tim Holtz’s demos by the way, so check out his blog if you want to see and hear him demo it.
Step by step
Apply a relatively thin acrylic paint to your stamp, like Distress Paint. Or, use some water to thin your regular acrylic paint. Now, be very quick to stamp it onto an empty background tag, because once the paint dries on your stamp, you won’t get the paint off any longer, for it will dry permanent…
Once the paint is dry, ink up your tag with some water-based inks and make an inked background. I picked the six colors of Ranger’s Distress ink you see in the picture above, and used a blending tool. Simply blend over the stamped parts: the paint will work as a resist for water-based inks, so your stamped image will appear through the ink! This works particularly well with darker colors of ink.
3. Now you can use regular ink, like some Archival ink, in a darker color to stamp other images over your background.
In the top right corner you can see I used cream-colored Distress paint, but this time not on a stamp but through a stencil. This gives the same resist effect when you ink over it with water-based inks. I even used water-based ink through an alphabet stencil over it, and the paint resisted that too.
The Archival ink I used for the large typewriter-script stamp on the other hand is oil-based, so it did cover the Distress Paint. This is a great and easy way to play around with layers of colors and patterns and add some extra dimension.
Alphabet stencil: water-based ink is resisted by the cream-colored paint, so diamond pattern still on top. Script stamp: oil-based ink covers everything, and is NOT resisted by paint, so diamond pattern is covered by the script pattern.
Below is the end result I reached – for now; some day I may add a sentiment or die-cut or some dimensional decorative element, should I decide I’m going to use it as a card and send it out. But for now I’m very pleased with it as is!
As you may have noticed, I like to send tea bags over the mail by way of sending someone sort of a ‘warm hug’. I’ve done several of these cards before, and I try to come up with new designs once in a while.
This week is such a time. I designed a way to tuck your customized tea bag envelope onto the front of your card so that it remains easily removable, yet fixed in place.
The papers used are Shabby Chic 6×6″ pad by Studiolight, and a sheet from the Wonderland collection by Stamperia.
I hope to have inspired you to send someone such a fun hug-in-a-mug yourself after watching this week’s video 🙂
At first glance this may look like your average layered card, matted on the inside and outsides. It holds a surprise however, for if you untie its little bow on the front, a little tri-fold is revealed, with five cute panels you can use to stamp or add some sentiments or images, or even to hide a little picture.
I used Romantique papers for this card, a 2010 Prima Marketing collection. Its romantic vintage patterns were so lovely I didn’t really want to cut into them, so I made my card 6 1/8 x 6 1/8″ (15.5 x 15.5 cm) – which turned out to be a beautiful, luxurious size, but note that you will need a larger envelope as well.
So enjoy the video – which this time is with music only 😉 – and please click the Like button below! 🙂
I found a great wooden desk organizer in one of our home decor stores, and I bought it to alter it. It was already painted white so I chose Kaisercraft’s Antique Bazaar, a collection that would go well with the white wood of the organizer.
The rounded shape of the organizer’s compartments presented a special challenge, especially on the insides and with the split compartment on the left – for which I had to create a very specially shaped mat:
I generally love the wide variety of vintage design paper collections out there, but some really stand out. Like Ancestry, an older collection by K&Company. I enjoyed working with its warm, nostalgic colors and patterns before, when I created my large family tree mini album back in 2013. I also used it to create the cute micro album in a box I showed you earlier this year.
And most recently I decided to give it one last go and use up all of the remaining paper I had left to create one more mini album. So with pleasure I present to you my Ancestry Mini Album – with pictures!
For as a bonus, I added photos to the album to give you an idea of how a scrapbook mini album looks with actual pictures in it! I decided to work with pictures from my own family tree, you know, the really old black & white ones, hidden treasures dugg up from my parents’ old family albums.
So enjoy the video and don’t forget to like & subscribe! 🙂
If you’d like to create this album yourself, I recommend the tutorial for my Life’s a Picnic mini album. There are some minor differences in page design and album closure but its basic design is quite similar. If you’d like to do an ancestry themed album, there’s one more Heirloom kit available in my shop!
You can check out the video for the Life’s a Picnic album here, in case you’re considering to buy the tutorial. And for another variation on this design – to give you some inspiration – you can check out my Christmas mini album too.
