Wednesday 1 July 2015

Life is Wonderful S1507 CTMH Stamp of the Month Australasian Blog Hop

 Hello and welcome aboard our Stamp of the month Australasian Close to My Heart Blog Hop. If you have arrived here from Georgia's Blog - Georgia Creates,  then you are in the right place. If you landed here by accident, no problem, please join in by following the link at the end of this post. 



 Today I would like to share with you this set of cards which feature July's Stamp of the Month: Life is Wonderful'  available exclusively throughout July for $27 or for just $5 when you spend $75 on CTMH products OR as part of our July campaign if you spend $32.50 on current retail priced stamps you can have this stamp set FREE!

 

All my card designs use the flourishes in the stamp set. I just liked the way they looked and couldn't stop creating patterns with them once I started. All my cards are 3.5 inches square on black cardstock embossed in silver.



My first card design was tricky to get accurate until I solved my accuracy problems with a bit of maths and some ingenuity.










Firstly I placed my two flourish stamps onto my versamat with the bottom of the stamps at the 1 3/4 marks. (I placed them here as that is the centre of the card).
I then placed my 2x3 1/2 inch block on top making sure the edges lined up with the 3 1/2 line and the 0 line.














 Next I placed two of my larger blocks on my versa mat making sure they were square and leaving space for a 3 1/2 inch card to fit on the mat alongside them.
















Next I inked up my stamp in versa mark ink and placed my block down making sure I slid it down the sides of the other two blocks which guided it into exactly the centre of the card.








 







I then rotated the card 90 degrees and repeated the stamping. I rotated the card twice more so that I had 4 perfectly lined up impressions of the stamps, giving me the pattern I wanted.

You could of course use any flat straight items to line up your block but I did find that my larger blocks did the job nicely.

Once it was all stamped I of course used silver embossing powder and my heat gun to heat emboss the design.











My second card design just uses one of the flourish stamps and repeatedly stamps it around a centre point.



My third card design uses just one of the flourish stamps and tessellates it to create a background style pattern.









My fourth design uses both flourishes to mirror each other in a border style effect.








Life is Wonderful is only available until the end of July from your CTMH consultant.  I'd love you to leave a comment before heading off to the next stop,  Denise's Blog, Scrap Stamp Share .