Chicks with Inkpads

Welcome to the very first post of Chicks with Inkpads! We are Cathy and Donna and we hope you'll join us on a little journey to creativity.

Both of us are avid rubber stampers (going on seven years now). Donna shares her talent for cardmaking and stamping as a Stampin' Up Demonstrator. Cathy has been teaching stamping and mixed media projects at her local scrapbooking stores and was the owner of The Ink Spot - a rubber stamping store located in Oakville, Ontario.

It's been quite a journey so far, but we both love a good road trip! We think the journey is the destination and with stamping we both agree that the best part of any project is the process. We love to experiment with colours, images, papers and embellishments to find that perfect combination (or sometimes, just to see what happens)! So we hope you'll check in often as we share our journey and we hope you'll share some of yours too..

So I thought I'd start things off with a little canvas, I just made for Valentine's Day. It's got some painting, some stamping and some scrapbooky stuff all mixed up together and I kinda like how it all came out.

If you'd like to try a project like this one - it was super easy! I purchased an 8x10 canvas from Walmart and painted the whole thing with Stream Dimensional Pearls acrylic paint by Ranger. It's a beautiful colour and has a pearlescent finish that you can't really see in the photo. I used Butterscotch pearls to roughly paint a heart shape on the canvas and feathered it towards the outer edges of the canvas. Then I filled the heart shape in with Cranberry Pearls.

Now I've tried stamping on canvas before with poor results. So I stamped a script background stamp on torn scraps of translucent tissue paper with waterproof black ink, then decoupaged them where I wanted them with Mod Podge to the canvas. Really soak the tissue with your Podge and it will virtually "disappear" into the painted background. Cool, huh?

Once the background was prepared, the rest was really easy - I just made a collage with index sized prints of different things I loved ( my family, my dog, disco dancing, napping and road trips) Some ribbon, some sparkly rhinestones,a little chandelier tag and "voila" this project was ready for it's close up!

So, come on. Join us on the journey. I challenge you all to create your own project incorporating the things you love and put it on display!