Where Was Crooked Stamper?

Helloooo! I am not dead! Thanks to the miracle of Blogger scheduling I have posted my regularly scheduled projects, but plain old stamping? Not so much. In fact, I am suffering from withdrawal.

So where have I been? Last week I went to Ohio to visit my house and the progress being made by the various contractors. It's a true transformation! As soon as it's finished and I've moved in, I'll share a few photos.

I also stayed up way too late chatting with my generous host, Tina, and then we attended Stampaway* with several stampy friends, and had some good food, followed by crafty shopping and more food. We attended the Friday night session (mostly because a lot of us are allergic to crowds ... these are my people!) so Saturday, after more food, we napped.

This past week I mostly recovered from the trip and being back to work. I did play a little bit with a few things, but I didn't make much. Today I decided to change that.

First, let me show you the one Make & Take I did at Stampaway:

They were pushing the gel pens, and this was a very cool way to use them. I actually had the pens in my paws, plus a bunch of various stickers, when I stopped and said NO, and I put it all back. I figured I already have a ton of stickers I could use for this, and I also have all the OTHER gel pens, and I really didn't need any more. I was so good.

So my idea was to try embossing a flower instead of using a sticker, and that's what I've been futzing with the past few evenings. Let me show you what came out of that effort:

Top left is the Make & Take, and the other three are the ones from my experiments. I tried three different embossing powder colors, and I think I like the gold best, or maybe the black. I know I do not like the white one. I used the same pink color on all three flowers to have a fair comparison, though I was tempted to stop with the (gah) pink already. The analyst in me forced my hand to make it fair. Sigh.

We used two different styluses to do the embossing on the vellum. First we traced the inner edges of the petals with one stylus, then flipped the vellum over and used a larger ball stylus to emboss the petals and "push" it so it pops out within the sticker. I don't have a stylus at home with a large ball tip, so I improvised and used the end of a paint brush handle. You can see some of the scratches from the stylus in the white flower's petals.

The coloring is done by scribbling a bit of a gel pen onto the raised vellum and using a water brush to spread it around. This lets you keep the darker color along the embossing and fade it out into the centers. The selling point of their new gel pens was their color intensity which is clearly evident here. I won't get the intensity of color with the pens I have, but I don't think I'll be doing this a lot, so I'm okay with it.

I may break out some of my stash of stickers one day ... you just never know.

So, I've officially re-entered The Captain's Quarters with this week's stack of challenges that interested me, so hopefully I'll actually get a few done!

Thanks for stopping by!

*Small world. When I had my monthly workshops, I had to carefully schedule in August because most of my customers went to Stampaway. Unfortunately I didn't see any of them on Friday, and we didn't go on Saturday, so if they were there, I missed them. Maybe next year!