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!!

Everything but a stamp...

Good evening. Just to let you know what we will be doing on Wednesday's workshop. As you can see from the title we will be stamping, but using anything apart from stamps! There will be a few options available with mini demos available from me, with Karen on hand to assist. (Michelle is off to the Ashley Centre Awards Ceremony - come on Lakeland!!) And yes a few Christmas cards are starting to creep in on this workshop but we are not full on into Christmas just yet.

So here's a few piccies and ideas of things to use as "stamps":

Fingerprint stamping

Carving stamps out of erasers and using funky foam stickers on bottle tops

Cutting out foam shapes using the Cuttlebug or scissors then using a sharp pencil to etch a design 

Inking up Cuttlebug embossing folders before running them through the machine

Don't forget to bring your "Hot, hot, hot/melted" challenge pages so we can vote for our next winner. A new challenge will be announced this week.

Your melted moments

Firstly well done to Billy for winning the Ink blot journal page challenge. Here is her winning entry as voted by you. Don't forget to bring your heated/melted/hot hot hot entries to the next workshop for your chance to win a free workshop.

Here is the gallery of your creations from the last workshop.

Melt pot with UTEE:

And also friendly plastic and shrink plastic:

Melting moments

This month we are focusing on heating and melting techniques. There will be three techniques to try.

Melt pot - dipping die cut pieces in UTEE in the Melt Pot to coat and create glossy embellishments.

Friendly Plastic - create colourful embellishments for your cards or wear as brooches.

Shrink Plastic - punch, stamp and shrink to create buttons and tile embellishments.

Pastel shades

Here are some pictures from the last workshop - Pan Pastels first:

The Mica powder cards proved a little more tricky to photograph on the night because of the sheen from the Cosmic Shimmer powders.

And guess who forgot to take piccies of the challenge pages too?!! But not to worry because we did make a note of whose was whose. Results announced at the next workshop. Hope you are all busy heating and melting for your next challenge page - due in September.

Powders and Pastels

In our July workshop we will be experimenting with Pan Pastels and Mica powders. Kay B and Kay P will be our guest demonstrators this month. Kay B will be showing you how to create backgrounds by blending Pan Pastels. She will be exploring using different textures of card, using the pastels over Versamark ink and removing colour using an eraser.

Kay P will also be using Versamark Ink but with Mica powders. She will be demonstrating the "Split Negative Mica technique". You can see below that the same Versamark stamped image is used with mica powders to create both "negative" and "positive" sections i.e. the powder sticks to the stamped image in some sections but not in others. Intrigued? All will be made clear on the night!!

Don't forget to bring your ink blot challenge pages this month. We will be operating a voting system on the night again to see who gets the next workshop free.

See you all on Wednesday.