Sweet Stamp Shop: Scrap Sunday

It's the weekend! For me (Michele), that's when I get most of my scrappy time. Or if I'm not scrapping, I'm definitely reading blogs to look for some scrappy or crafty inspiration. If that's what you are doing this fine Sunday morning, then you've come to the right place!

My Sweet Stamp Shop layout today is based on a pretty funny story. When my daughter was about 18 months old, we visited her grandparents in Spain. Her grandma (who we call Lala) let her play with this set of cups and saucers that she had out on display in the kitchen. I thought Lala was crazy, I mean who on EARTH lets an 18-month old child play with delicate glass tea cups?!?? I looked more closely at the set, and I noticed that most of the pieces already had a chip or two. And then I counted cups and saucers....one.. two... wait a minute... there are 4 cups and only 3 saucers!! Ah-ha! I do believe Lala was just looking for an excuse to toss the whole set. So sure enough, as my daughter practiced hanging up the cups and held the pieces in the air, every so often one would fall and break. And Lala just laughed and picked up the pieces, then continued to play the game with her granddaughter ;-)

Since the story and pictures involve tea cups, I knew I wanted to use the Afternoon Delight stamp set. I pulled out a few Cosmo Cricket 'Early Bird' papers and some others from my stash. I love the retro look they have, the colors worked well with the pictures, and there were some sweet little coffee/tea cups, just waiting to be fussy cut out.

I also pulled out some Cosmo Cricket chipboard stickers.

The stickers are cute, but they are from a different collection, and the colors weren't 100% what I was looking for (I didn't want pink in this particular layout, for one). No worries, though, because I've got some SWEET stamps to help me make some embellishments to compliment my papers and my pre-made embellies!

I actually started to build my layout with the stamps. I stamped the Afternoon Delight teapot, mason jar, and tea bag images onto my chosen patterned papers and cut out the images. I initially started with black ink, but as I moved along I realized the papers had more brown tones in them, so re-stamped and re-fussy cut images in brown ink.

I knew I would add to my off white background later, either with misting or stamping, so I didn't glue any of the elements down. I just laid out the elements like this first:

Then I adhered the patterned papers, setting pictures and embellies off to the side. The advantage of laying things out ahead of time is that you can be sure you are happy with the general placement of your embellies. Then you can mist or stamp in the areas where the embellies will go, allowing the ink to become part of the background paper. This is what my layout looked like after adding drops of mist:

Then the layout was ready for pictures, title and embellishments. After I had everything in place, I was looking for a few final touches. I needed a little word art to add to my embellishments. This is the perfect time to pull out some more stamps! There are tons of useful word stamps in the Shop! I chose words from Today Was, Baby Love and Spin Me to add "love this" and "fun" to the layout.

Here's my completed layout. Don't you love how the teapot and mason jar are truly unique embellies? And just imagine how different they would look on another layout using different papers and a different color scheme!

To recap some of my scrappy stamping tips for you today:

Fussy cut your stamped images to make your own embellishements. Use foam adhesive to pop them up and create dimension.
Cut out stamped words to layer on top of your embellie clusters.
Before misting, inking or stamping your background, lay out your main elements first, without adhering, to envision where you want the ink or mist to be. Set your photos and other elements aside that you want to keep clean, then add your ink or mist.

Do you use stamps on your layouts? If you do, what is your favorite way to use them? And if you don't, what's holding you back? Let's talk about it! Leave me a comment below or on the Sweet Stamp Shop Facebook page and share how you are or are not using stamps on your scrapbook layouts!

I'll see you again in a couple weeks!
-Michele

Check out the sets I used on today's project:

Afternoon Delight