April Leading Lady Shirley Bampton | Take Two

Our April Leading Lady, Shirley Bampton aka shirley-bee is back for her sensational second performance!  If you missed her smashing debut you must see it...CLICK HERE.   Today she's pulled out her inks and ingenuity to give you even more millage from your stamps.

Ladies and gentlemen, Shirley....

Hellooo!  Thank you so much for your lovely response to my first Leading Lady post for Winnie & Walter last week.  I hope you'll enjoy this week's installment too.

The brief was simple: do whatever makes you giddy, said Shay.  Well, if you know me at all, you'll know that Distress Inks make me giddy - I'm surprised I didn't use them last week, to be honest ;).  One of my favourite ways of using Distress Inks is to ink the solid reverse of a stamp, give it a light spritz of water, then stamp and let the colours slurp together.  Magic!  

I've used standard cardstock for all these cards.  The smoothness of the card allows the ink to play on the surface for a little longer than, say, watercolour card, so you get a bit of time to work the colours by lifting one side of the stamp slightly away from the card then replacing it, which squeezes the ink between the stamp and the stamped area.  This trick also helps with coverage if your spritzing was a little uneven and your first impression had patches of white card showing through.  Make sense?

For this first card, I used the back of the large heart stamp in the From The Bottom of My Heart set (this set was a free-with-qualifying-purchase set for the January/February release, but will be on general sale in 2017). I inked the reverse of the stamp with Picked Raspberry, Ripe Persimmon and Spiced Marmalade, then spritzed, stamped and slurped.  The sentiment and small hearts are part of the set.

For this second card, I used the reverse of the heart cluster from Sending You With Evelin T Designs set with Tumbled Glass, Evergreen Bough and Broken China (I think!).  The other effect that I like about this technique is that the watery ink can leak outside the image as in this case, giving a ragged edge. 

I like using Pine Needles and Forest Moss for Christmas/fir trees, and with this technique no two trees look the same.  Using the reverse of the large tree stamp from the Happy Owlidays With Evelin T Designs set, I stamped the first tree on the right, masked it, reloaded and stamped a second tree slightly behind, then the tree on the left.  Then I decided I wanted a hillside in the background, so I just laid some copy paper at an angle as a mask, and stamped.  Wouldn't you know it, the ink soaked through the mask, which explains those extra little marks.  Or we could just pretend that the snow is melting near that tree ;)

When I was inking the reverse of the tree stamp, I noticed that if I dragged the inkpad (Distress Ink Mini) down the stamp, it left a pattern as the ink pooled, so I thought I'd try stamping without spritzing to see what I got. Funky, eh?  Also, because the stamp isn't saturated with spritzed water, when you stamp over a masked image you don't get the soak-through.  I stamped that gorgeously cute robin, coloured him with Distress Inks (of course!) and fussy cut him.  Adding a bit of shadow with Hickory Smoke helps to ground the images.

So now I'm two Christmas cards nearer to my target.  (What target?  I just keep making Christmas cards until Christmas Eve, and hopefully I've made enough by then!)

I've got a $30 gift certificate to the Winnie & Walter store that Shay has generously provided for me to give away to one lucky commenter, so don't forget to leave a comment on my blog post.  And if you haven't left a comment on my first Leading Lady post yet, pop on over and leave me a comment there to increase your chances of winning.

I'll be back with more Winnie & Walter goodness next Saturday, see you then!

Happy Owlidays with Evelin T Designs

Sending You with Evelin T Designs

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