Stamped Embellishments (including stamping on linen and wood)

Today I want to share a page with lots of stamped embellishments, including one where I stamped on linen, and one where I stamped on wood!

This layout was inspired by a couple of things – one was some new Avery Elle Ink Pads which I recently purchased, so I wanted to do lots of stamping, and one was the new Big Picture Classes website – I was inspired by a small element of Natalie Elphinstone’s ‘Creating With Kids’ class where her kids stamped some embellishments for cards, but I figured it would work for layouts too! (NB: I’ll be writing up a review of the Big Picture Classes new website some time next week.)

Here’s the page I ended up with…

I am calm with you:

These are the supplies I started with – I picked out a photo and chose some stamps I might want to use with it, and got out all my large ink pads (new Avery Elle ones and some old American Crafts ones), and my Promarkers, including a Blender Promarker pen which I’d also just bought and wanted to try out:

Then I picked out my background 12×12 paper, and lots of smaller patterned papers and cardstock scraps that I might want to use:

First I stamped a journaling spot using a Roald Dahl book stamp, and the Avery Elle Aquamarine Ink Pad:

Next I wanted to try and make a domed embellishment, a bit like a flair badge. I had seen THIS TUTORIAL on You Tube about making your own enamel dots, and I decided to try it on a larger scale!

First I stamped a ‘This is true happiness’ Elle’s Studio stamp using the Avery Elle Conch Shell Ink Pad, onto a woodgrain patterned paper scrap:

Then I cut it out and flipped it over, placed it on a piercing mat, and rubbed the back with a rounded end of a pen, starting in the middle and working my way out in a circular motion (like in the You Tube video above):

Here’s how it looked when I finished rubbing:

I then coated the shape with glossy accents, using a pin to push it out to the edges of the circle, and to pop any large bubbles that formed:

Here’s how it looked when it was dry (I used foam dots in the middle of the circle to stick it to the layout when I was ready to do so):

Then I wanted to try stamping on another material, so I used the Avery Elle Sapphire and Fizz Ink Pads to stamp a Pink Paislee Kite onto a scrap of linen:

I ironed some interfacing onto the back to stop it fraying, then cut both kites out. I cut two triangle pieces and some bows out of the orange kite and layered them on top of the blue kite, using my Herma dots tape runner to stick them together:

Now I wanted to try out my Promarker Blender pen, so I stamped a Jillibean Soup stamp using Memento ink (so it wouldn’t bleed when I used the Promarkers). I’d performed some ‘stamp surgery’ on this stamp before, as it used to say ‘thumbs up’ in the rectangular hole, but I cut the words out with a craft knife so that the space was blank for me to write dates, etc:

I coloured some of the stamp using the Blender pen and a Shale pen around the edges (colouring with the blender pen first, then the shale pen, then the blender again). The yellowed parts of the stamp were coloured with a Vanilla pen, and Coral around the edges:

I made a few more stamped embellishments, using Avery Elle’s Fog ink to stamp a cloud and a chevron-arrow onto patterned papers, and the Conch Shell Ink to stamp 3 little hearts onto a wood veneer speech bubble – I had tried a solid heart first but that bled too much into the wood grain, the outlined hearts stayed much clearer:

I placed a couple of patterned papers, my photo, and my stamped embellishments onto the layout, and decided there was too much empty space at the bottom of the page:

So I stamped some Jillibean Soup circles onto graph paper (using Fizz and Sapphire):

And I cut these in half to stick them at the bottom of the photo / paper area of the page. I also stuck down the bottom layers of paper and the journaling spot, and then flicked Heidi Swapp Coral Mist over the page:

Then I just stuck everything down, wrote out my date and journaling, and added a few extra embellishments, like alphas for my title (‘I am calm with you’), some gems, a sequinned star and bow, some grey wood hearts, and a couple of chipboard stickers.

I love how the date looks on the stamp, tucked behind the domed circle:

You’ll notice I added another stamp to the journaling spot too, as couldn’t decide how to write my journaling across the ‘pages’ of the book, so I wrote on one ‘page’ and filled the other with a stamp:

Here’s the whole page again:

I am so happy that I’ve put my new ink pads, and a lot of my unloved stamps, to good use! I shall definitely be trying this again.

For anyone wondering about the quality of the Avery Elle ink pads, they all seemed to work pretty well to me. There were a couple of stamps I couldn’t get to print clearly, but I think this was because of the quality of the stamps instead of the quality of the inks. I shall try and do a review at some point, but I want to get hold of a Cherry pad first, as that’s a colour I really wanted but it was out of stock at Make The Day Special, where I bought the others from.

Do you do much stamping on your projects? Have you ever used stamps to make embellishments before?

Have a great weekend,

Jennifer x