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We love our Guest Designers! We love having visitors over at our blog and getting inspired by their amazing and very different artwork. Let’s face it, you can give the same stamp set to 20 people and not two projects will look the same.

This month we are thrilled to welcome Sophie Schoenhentz to our team. Sophie lives near Paris, France, with her husband and 3 kids. She’s been a passionate card maker for many years. Her style can definitely be defined as clean & simple. Sophie loves dots and stripes and papers with graphic designs. Her favorite products are stamps and brads, which you will find on most of her projects.

Here are Sophie’s answers to our nosy scrapping questions:

1. What got you hooked on scrapbooking and card making?

I’ve always loved paper crafting. I started making cards for Christmas more than 10 years ago and gradually for any other occasion. I make even more than I can send ! I like using all those scrapbooking products and many blogs are very inspiring.

2. What does your work area look like?

Unfortunately, I don’t have much space. I work on the dining room table which is continuously cluttered with papers, stamps, embellishments… Nevertheless, I have fitted a little storage room up with drawers for my stamps and little embellishments, shelves for my papers, jars for my buttons… ( you can see  it on the 2 photos below). My dream is to have a REAL scraproom !

3. Do you have a favorite colour combination for your creations?

I love kraft and white and often use them together with another colour, I think any matches. I rarely use more than 3 colours on my cards and my style is clean and simple.

4. How much time do you spend on papercrafts every week?

I’m a full-time worker and mother of 3 children so I can’t spend as much time on paper crafts as I would like but I try to plan 2-3 hours a week.

5. What is your favourite dessert?

My favourite dessert is fresh fruit salad. It’s changing according to the season and I love all these colours!

These are my cards, made with “Colourful Companions” butterflies and “Splash me a lot” alphabet stamps.

With such big letters, you can easily create short messages.

I love unity – so, in the upper red strip, I punched the same holes as on the butterfly’s wings.

There’s no need to put a lot of things, a stamped butterfly, 3 buttons, a sentiment…that’s it!

These cards are lovely, Sophie! We love your colour scheme, clean and fresh, and your sense of proportion and positioning. Very simple and beautiful. Thanks for sharing these with us.

Sophie will be back later this month with a tutorial for all of you. Stay tuned!

Now try your hands on some clean and simple cards.

Happy stamping, love, Bettina

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Hooray! We got a winner!

Thanks to everyone who participated in our contest of July 1st!

Let’s see who gets to play with the lastest set: Lots of Dots sentiments…

Here is the winning comment: Oh these would come in super handy! Anne L., Grande Prairie, Aberta

Anne, please e-mail us your address and don’t forget to e-mail your projects done with this new set!

Enjoy the stamping!

Bettina

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hello there. So I escaped last week to the lake and totally relaxed! and I definitely needed it. Our main computer crashed, my allergies had flared up, the kids were vibrating and I needed to get away. So of course I planned some scrapbooking projects to do. When I go to the lake I like to create projects for the future. stuff that isn’t assignment related because when you go to the lake, obviously you can’t take the whole scrapbook room.(I wish!) So I like to develop cards, tags and journaling blocks, backgrounds for scrapbooking that I can file appropriately and they are ready when I need them. So the following are exactly that…my “ready to go” projects. LOL.

I decided to take only one stamp set, 2 colours of ink and 1 cardstock colour. This limits your creativity for choice of supplies, but also allows you not to have to take as long trying to figure out which product to use. Therefore I end up getting lot’s done.
so I started out making journaling blocks cause I  am a serious scrapbooker. LOL! I stamped the background with a few light coloured leaves. then I hand drew lines that I will eventually write on. I love the whimsical carefree lines.

then I created some tags that I will use for place tags at Thanksgiving: we have such a large family and my mom started the tradition of name tags. So I thought why not make ones that I can reuse to put beside photos in an album? and maybe journal about the person on them.

then I created a whole bunch of cards. Not all of these did I put a sentiment on yet, as I am not sure what I will actually use them for yet, but they are ready when I need them…

then I created a bookmark, cause I LOVE to read!


then I of course prepared a stamped background for a layout. perfect for future fall layouts.

here’s a few close ups of individual leaves cut out and enhanced in different ways.

Thanks for checking it out. what kind of projects do you prepare?
smiles,
Leica

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I don’t know about you, but I love visiting my local dollar store. I always find something I can alter or stamp on.

In one recent trip, I found this great star shaped glass dish. As soon as I saw it I thought about the small star stamp in the “Deck the Halls” set and I thought up the most fun idea. To create this project you need a glass dish (preferably star shaped), Stazon Ink, Stamps and an acrylic block. You will also need a roll of masking tape…Intrigued?

Affix the small star cluster stamp to your acrylic block. Put it as close to the edge as possible so that have more control over the placement of your image.

Apply the Stazon to your stamp, and then stamp the image onto the glass. For shaped pieces, such as a star shape, its very easy to go around the shape on the flat surface. Place your forefinger on the inside of the dish and your thumb on the outside to keep the block securely in place. This is important because the glass is slippery and you could easily smear your image otherwise. Stamp your image all the way around the dish.

Now, you’ll notice that I was only able to stamp my image on the “flat” parts of the dish. How am I ever going to get the stamp images on the points and angles? Good question….and I pondered that myself for a few minutes. This is where the masking tape comes in!

Remove the stamp from your acrylic block, and attach it to a piece of masking tape. The tape gives you the ability to make your stamp flexible, allowing you to stamp your image onto curved, square and other “not flat” surfaces. You can apply the tape directly to the glass. Let it sit for about 5 seconds before removing it. Continue around the dish so that you get all of the “pointed” surfaces covered.

Now, for the interior corners…take the tape off the stamp, and reapply it to the FRONT of the stamp, covering up the bottom portion of the image.

The reason for this seemingly strange application is two fold – first, it allows you to overlap the image with the image you already have stamped, making it look more natural. Second, it gives you greater ease of application. Stamp your image on the interior corners all the way around and fill in the blank space you have left on the dish.

You can turn a cheap dollar store trinket into an expensive boutique store item…using  the stuff in your stash and a little ingenuity.

Thanks for visiting! See you next time,

Marci

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I work at a school and when there’s scrappy-type work to be done for the staff, it seems to fall into my lap.  Not that I mind at all, of course   I  love to get paid to scrapbook!  This past month, we had a long-standing music teacher retire and for her retirement tea she requested a notebook like I’d made for another teacher the year before, that everyone could write notes in so she could remember everyone.

I dug out my most recent stamps from my Stamp BOX - A tree for all Seasons, Floating Leaves, and Funky Flowers and I created scenes using these stamps, leaving room on the pages for plenty of journaling.  I made large, full pages for the teachers and staff to write on, and smaller (4/page) sections for some of the students who have had this teacher for many years.  Everyone loved it, and I got to play a little putting together trees, flowers and leaves into scenes.  It was so much more interesting than blank journaling pages and WAY less expensive than buying a Guest book or something.   Thanks for looking!

The front cover

The 4/page section for student comments

Some of them even coloured the images in, exactly as I thought they might

One of the staff pages with stamps from Funky Flowers

Thanks for looking,

Cathy