A Tale of 2 Cities

Back to the challenges, but first we had a little competition last week.  This challenge site is all about using stamps and ink, so we asked you how many different ways you could list to use stamps.

We had 2 smashing entries Pia and Laura and just as we hoped we learnt something new to us.   Both lists have now been published as comments to the competition.

The Winner of the most inventive technique is Laura with her idea of using stamps to decorate cake with edible ink and or impressing into royal icing.

And the person we would like to invite as a guest designer is Pia.  If you would both like to contact me  Zoechaos@icloud.com I can get the stamps in the post to Laura and arrange the Guest DT spot with Pia.

Time for another challenge and this time it is my choice.   As you know we are looking for pairs of projects inspired by the theme.   My theme for this fortnight is CITIES.    As you might have realised by now my intention for this challenge is to create a set a playing cards.   Not a new idea projects making entirely different sets have been around probably as long as playing cards.   They are often created as charity fund raising/awareness tools.  If you are interested in learning more about playing cards the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards is a great starting point.

For now my set is just something I've wanted to do for a several years and the idea of pairs seemed the perfect time to do it.

This card celebrates 2 of my favourite cities London & Paris and their two marvellous landmarks.   The London Eye this is a Stamping' up stamp, in blue Stayzon.   The Eiffel Tower in grey stayzon is from a long cherished but never used polymer set.   The alphabet stamps were from Trimline (I think) years ago and cost just £1, they are great so long as you do not want perfectly lined up and straight words.   The colouring is all felt tip, you cannot use solvent based pens with solvent based inks unless you want a blurred/muddy effect.    The hardest thing to do was drawing the clubs but these are at least the right shape for all their variety.

This 2nd card is a fantasy city, part of an Addicted to Stamps plate.   The buildings remind me of parts of Italy where buildings are brightly coloured and decorated outside.   Trompe-l'oeil techniques are employed with very dramatic and realistic effect.   Being southern Italy the skies are generally wall to wall blue.    Coloured again with felt pens a bright and cheerful effect was easy peasy.

My teamies are all doing different things for our challenges and their terrific takes on my Cities theme are just below.   If you want to know more about their makes you will need to visit their sites.

Jane

Christi 

Over to you now remember we are looking for pairs of things, playing cards, bookmarks, altered tins, any format so long as there are two of them with our theme as the main focus and you must use rubber/polymer stamps.

An InLinkz Link-up

Competition Closed - Here is your team's list

Thank you Pia and Laura for entering our little competition Christi, Jane & I are going to have to get our heads together to decide who gets the stamps.   We will let you know tomorrow, in the mean time here is the list of Stamping Techniques we came up with, its a team effort not just one person's list.

1.   Simple stamping

2.   Kiss Stamping, 1st impression onto a flat rubber plate and then from that onto the project gives a reverse image.

3. Stamping with Water Soluble Inks
      brush out the image with a water brush to blur the edges and/or fill the image
      Spritz the inked stamp with water before stamping
      Stamp onto damp paper/card

4.   Heat embossing aka wet embossing

5.   Use a glue pad and sprinkle Glitter or Flock onto the image.

6.   Use stamps to make impressions into embossing paste or triple embossing (layers of hot ep)

7.   Use a rubber stamp or good quality polymer (Such as Clarity) as a plate and iron fantasy fibres and/or fantasy film over the design.

8.  Unmounted stamping
       Great on curved surfaces
       Allows use of just part of the image

9.   Stamping layers (see Zoe's Samples for challenge 3)

10. Use one inking for multiple impressions

11. Stamping and masking

12. Repeated stamping to make borders or background patterns

13. Use Solvent inks and stamp on glass, ceramics or other non porous/glossy surfaces

14. Faux Batik technique

15. Stamping with bleach

16. Stamping with Gesso or into wet gesso

17. Stamping onto Almost Leather or Fun Foam to create embossed leather effect

18. Potato stamping.

19. Make your own 3d decoupage or 3d topper with Mandala stamp

We kinda ran out of ideas at this point but are sure you know of more techniques please feel free to share them with us.   Perhaps if you would like we can give tutorials on some of the techniques listed above on future 5th Saturdays.

See you tomorrow with a new challenge.

5th Saturday bonus

Thank you for supporting us and sharing your pairs.   We are enjoying the challenge and having a lot of fun challenging ourselves and getting very inky in the process.   We promised that in those months with a 5th Saturday we would do something different for you.   For this the first of these bonus days we have a competition, and a prize.

We would like you to comment on this post listing as many different uses/techniques you know using a rubber/polymer stamp and ink.   We will not publish the comments to keep it fair but of course we will read them.   So thinking caps on, how do you use your stamps list all the different ways.   We will give a prize, the pair of stamps above of stamps to the most inventive technique.    There will also be a Guest Spot for the person who knows the greatest number of different techniques.

You will have 6 days to respond, the competition closes on Thursday 3rd September at Midnight UK time.   The winners will be announced next Saturday when we introduce our 3rd challenge.

And the Winners are. . . . for Challenge 1

Hello everyone! The winners of Twofers very first challenge were easy to choose as we only had 3 entries, but, us being the new kid on the block and all, I think we did smashing!! I want to thank these the three wonderful ladies who took time out to play in our first challenge, Cats, so here are our Top Three, in no particular order:

Sandma's Homemade Cards

Joan

Pia

Ladies, congratulations and please take our Top Three badge from the sidebar.  Thank you SO much for playing and please consider playing again in Challenge #2 ~ Christi, Jane & Zoe 

Challenge #2 - Weddings

Welcome back! Today sees the start of our second challenge, and this time our theme is WEDDINGS.  Don't forget, we want to see TWO pieces of work from you, and the theme must be obvious on them. Today's challenge is brought to you by Jane.

Now I've been thinking for a while that with more and more countries legalising same sex marriage, there's going to soon be a real need in the crafting community for ideas for same-sex wedding cards, so I decided for my Twofer today I would make two cards that were more or less identical except that one was for two men marrying each other, and the other for two women. In order to make my basic design suitable for both, I used rainbow colours. I had some rainbow peel offs with love and romance themes in my stash, and a sheet of rainbow-coloured floral vellum, and I stamped a "Love" panel for each card using a rainbow ink pad.

Then came the main wording - that was more of a challenge! I had to use a clear plastic stamp that said "Best Wishes to the Bride & Groom" and cut away the words Bride and Groom, using a stamp positioner to add them separately after stamping the rest of the sentiment. Maybe as demand increases we will see "Bride & Bride" and "Groom & Groom" stamps go on sale.

Now I'm going to hand over to teamies Christi and Zoe to show us their take on the challenge, before handing over to YOU to add your links.

Zoe

Christi

An InLinkz Link-up

Welcome to our first challenge, with the theme of ..... CATS

CATS

Yes, today is the beginning of a brand new challenge blog - TWOFERS! As the name suggests, you will be required to make TWO of whatever project you desire and then simply link them up!  Well there are a couple of rules like you Must use a stamp and ink, no digis and our theme needs to be the main focus of your project. Please Check out the rules !!!!

Since I, Christi, got to chose our first theme, I chose cats (which, if you read my blog shouldn't come as a surprise) and I had a blast digging out some very old stamps to play with; since I have so many cats stamps, it was difficult to decide which ones to use. Both the stamps I used have been in my possession for years, but I haven't had the occasion to use the cat in the basket, so this is it's first time on a card (and, of course, when I went to go search for the stamps so I could link to them, almost all of them have disappeared.) In order to differentiate which card I am talking about I am going to give them separate names.

Here are both my cards

How I Made my Women and Cats card:

Cream Card Base
The Kitty Art Rubber Stamp by The Stampsmith
Sentiment Stamp (company unknown)
White Glossy Card
Document Stamping Ink (like Staz-On ink)
Die-Namics Stitched Oval Stax
Spellbinders Labels Fourteen S4-290
Colorbox Metalextra Gold Rush Ink
Clear Embossing Powder
Background Paper (company unknown)
Small Gold Metallic Bow

If you are a regular blog reader you have seen me work with these fantastic photo stamps made by The Stampsmith before, but for those of you who are new to photostamps The Stampsmith has an awesome FAQ page for them and you can find that here. Anyhow, I stamped my Kitty Art stamp on glossy paper, using the Document Ink, and set it aside to dry. I can never get a good picture of these stamps, but trust me, they truly look like photos in person. While kitty was drying, I set about figuring the background, how I was going to present the sentiment and other design details.

So I decided to cut the picture and some embossed foil paper using the Stitched Oval Stax. I then stamped the sentiment with gold ink on glossy paper and embossed it with clear embossing powder. I then used the Labels Fourteen to die cut the sentiment. Set those three things aside and sized my gold polka dot background paper, then attached that to the cream card base. Played with the placement of the ovals and sentiment for a bit, then settled on the final design. Topped the card off with the cute little bow.
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How I Made my Your Every Thought card:

White Card Base
Cat in Basket Rubber Stamp (made by Cat Dancing Designs, out of business)
Sentiment Stamp (Limited Edition, bought by Hampton Art, couldn't find stamp)
Tim Holtz Sizzix Labels, #660060
Ranger Archival Ink in Jet Black
Background Paper
2 Black Brads

I have had this stamp for SO long - I purchased it at a stamp convention in NY. I love how the cat is slightly menacing peeking over the basket - one of my current kitties, Bud, is a Box Cat. He will literally try to fit in ANY box, no matter how small. And if the box is too small, he will scratch it to pieces trying to make it bigger! OK, I could go on about my cats for hours, so lets move on.

As usual, the first step is to stamp everything - in this case on white card using the Ranger Archival Ink in Jet Black. I had found the background paper in my bin that holds all my kitty stuff but there was no manufacturer information. I liked the little hints of paws. After I cut the paper, I attached it to the card base and then went through my scraps to find a piece of red that matched so I could mount my sentiment on it. I sized my sentiment and adhered that to the red paper, put the brads in and set it aside.

I took the Tim Holtz Labels die cuts and used one to cut out the cat. I centered the image, attached that and attached the sentiment. Easy peasy!

A lot of my friends are cat lovers and now I have 2 cute cards to send out when need be. 

You have two whole weeks to get your stamping on with your cat stamps, so please consider joining! Thanks, Christi

Here are the ways my two teamies have used my theme of Cats

Jane

Zoe

An InLinkz Link-up

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