Meet the new stamp designers...

Lots of "busy bees" and creativity flowing on Wednesday night. We'll never need to buy stamps again! Here are the artistic products of this month's workshop.

Monica and Val enjoyed the fingerprint art.

Sue's completed fingerprint cards. Click here to find where our ideas came from.

Carol used a funky foam bottle top stamp for her background and drew her own dragonfly design in funky foam to create the print.

Brenda discovered that her roller cutter made an effective pattern on her funky foam flower.

Katharine drew her own design on to funky foam to create a monkey card for her little boy.

Kay B drew and cut out this striking flower design using funky foam.

From where Karen was sitting it looked like something else though! Well done on keeping a straight face Kay!!

Karen cut out a quirky little house from an eraser and created a "New Home" card.

Sally and Billy made their own Christmas Tree eraser stamps and created a trio of cards each.

Linda W made a snowflake background using distress ink on a Cuttlebug embossing folder.

While all this was going on Michelle was stuffing her face at the race course and Lakeland received the award for Marketing Initiatives! Well done Michelle and Lakeland!

And well done to our second and third place winners of the ink blot challenge from last month - Kay B 2nd and Linda W 3rd.

Winners of the "Hot, hot hot" challenge will be announced at the next workshop and don't forget that your completed journals (with a minimum 10 pages) are due in at the November 12th workshop. So get stamping with those fruit and veg!!

Distress Inks Mastered!

Well done to all our new recruits on Wednesday night. You did a great job on your first Distress Ink cards. And here are the photos to prove it! 

Thank you to Kay for her beginner's demo - exploring stamping, distressing edges and the basics of matting and layering.

Michelle demonstrated a double resist technique, first stamping and embossing plain card. Then adding colour distress ink. Then stamping and embossing again, before finally adding a dark colour distress ink. Very effective results! Click here for a tutorial.

And finally the distress inks and water demo. We looked at three techniques with water :

• stamping an image with distress inks and either spritzing or blending the colour with a wet paintbrush

• inking up an acrylic block then spritzing the block with water and stamping

• inking up card with distress inks then spritzing a stamp with water and stamping to create a watermark image (didn't get any piccies!)

 Click here for 'How to guide' for each water technique.

Stamping techniques with a twist...

This month's workshop is dedicated to slightly more advanced stamping techniques, but don't worry if you feel you haven't mastered the basics, as most of the demos will help to reinforce the basic skills, whilst at the same time extending your expertise and allowing you to think about stamping in a different way.

I will be demonstrating stamping through paper stencils, using regular stamps, distress inks and the See D's Morsels sets that we haven't used for a while.

Kay is also on hand to demo collage stamping (see also first photo in this blog entry), using masking tape to mask sections of your card while you stamp. She will show you how to create backgrounds and embellishments using this technique.

And for those of you who want to become more expert in stamping and heat embossing, Michelle will be showing you tips and tricks with this technique.