Quick Tip: Cleaning Your Acrylic Blocks

Quick Tip:

I'm sure the awesome stampers that are out there are going to cringe at this picture.

I believe I've mentioned a time or two, stamping is not really my thing. I ADORE how it looks, but I've never quite gotten the hang of remembering to use my stamps.

Perhaps it's because I let my acrylic blocks look like this:
*shudders*

I discovered a really quick fix for cleaning this off, that most of you probably have in your house!

A magic eraser!
It cleans nearly all the ink off, presto chango! (Even the Staz-on!) And I didn't have to go out and buy some fancy cleaning product. :)

Now maybe I'll get to stampin' more on my projects.... :)

Painted Embellishment

I have lots of friends named Michelle that inspire me. ;) A couple of them on this team! However, today my inspiration comes from another Michelle that is not a scrapbooker, but is a incredibly talented artist (and one of my best friends!).

She created some little watercolor paintings a few years ago on top of text paper, and that is what I had in mind when I made this little embellishment for my layout.

Start off with a square or rectangle of text paper. I used some October Afternoon paper from the Lemonade Stand kit (5 left!).

Choose several colors of acrylic craft paint. You just need a small drop!

Add a little bit of water to each drop.
Brush on some of the watered down paint on the text paper.

Continue to do this to form your background. You don't have to cover the whole thing!

I wanted to make a happy little flower picture- it's simple enough for me to paint!

If you leave some globs of paint on the picture, it'll dry with some texture.
I cut out another quote from the same paper and adhered it on top, along with embellishing it with one of the rhinestone brads from the kit.
Check out that cool embellishment!



(The background/border of this page is made from the Jenni Bowlin Coredinations cardstock in the Lemonade stand kit. To make it coordinate with the painted embellishment, I used the same paint on the embossed polka dots, and then roughly traced around them with a pen.)

Making Flowers with Border Stamps

The NEW Lemonade Stand kit (Just 15 LEFT!!!) includes an adorable little stamp set by Prima with two lace border pieces. Naturally you could use these to add a border strip along your page somewhere, or even stamp several strips and create a mitered frame around the edge of your page or a photo. But today I wanted to show you how you could use the border stamps to create FLOWERS.



First, stamp your image repeatedly along a strip of smooth cardstock. I used the edge of the paper as my guide. If you would like a larger flower, simply leave a space from the edge. You will need two 12" stamped strips per flower.



Next, score your stamped strip along the design. You will want to score in two places along the design; the top of the scallop and the bottom of the scallop.



You will have something that looks like this.



Next, cut out your design.



Fold the strip accordian style along the scored lines. You should now have two strips that look like this.



Glue the two strips together end-to-end, matching up the pattern. You will now have a circle that looks like this.



Punch a circle from a scrap piece of cardstock. Apply a glob of quick-drying glue or hot glue to the center. Gather your circle together and push it down flat into a flower shape. Adhere to circle and hold in place until the glue dries.



This is what the back of the flower looks like. My cardstock dried a little off-center, but that won't matter because you won't see it. :)



The larger flower will have the white portion of the strip towards the center. Don't worry about that, you can cover it up with a flower center.



Decorate the center of your flower as desired with a patterned paper, fabric, felt, buttons, brads . . . it's up to you!



I chose to cut a design from patterned paper and then layered a dimensional sticker on top.


And here is my resulting page!





Page created with the Lemonade Stand kit.