Pottery Garden

How about one of my finds from the Heirloom Rubber Stamp Show that I attended yesterday? After hours of strolling the booths {and spending money!}, my girlfriends and I stopped for a quick bite to eat ... and then I came home ready to CREATE! The message was clear to Kevin when I said "I'm going upstairs to change into my stamping clothes!" Here's what I made:

These are 5x7 sheets of stationery --- in other words it is not a card that opens up. The message is intended to be written on the front, short and sweet! This is a 5-piece stamp set made by a most fascinating company, Rubber Stamp Tapestry. They had so many beautiful sets it was hard to choose just one! I know that I am going to use this set over and over again.

Here is a close up of my first notecard. I used my long rectangle nesties to frame the stamped Pottery Garden, and added a nice sentiment at the bottom separated by a thin piece of cardstock. Note the flower clusters on both sides of the sentiment? You can do so much with this stamp set!

Here is a close up of my second notecard. This time, I cut my card a bit smaller so the oval nestie could be adhered as a card-topper (hangs off the edge of the card). I then created a custom 1" strip of stamped DP using the Pottery Garden stamps and adhered it across the bottom. I really like this look!

I stamped the Pottery Garden directly onto the top of my third notecard, separated by a thin strip of DP, rounded the top edges only, and added a sweet sentiment at the bottom. I did a lot of aging with a stipple brush, because I think it lends itself well to the Pottery Garden. Since these stamps are so unique, I prepared a step-by-step tutorial to demonstrate. Here we go!

To start, I stamped a row of pots in Chocolate Chip on watercolor paper, but any good quality cardstock will do. This is one stamp - five pots, but you could easily mask your stamp if you did not want all five pots.

All of the flower and leaves stamps in this set are mounted on a wood pencil. How cool is that? To build my flowers, I first stamped the itsy bitsy pinwheel flower in Perfect Plum. Stamp 2 or 3 times to get a lighter color with the second impressions.

Next, stamp itsy petal flower in Night of Navy, stamping in clusters. The pencil stamps are so quick and easy!

Next, I stamped the itsy accent leaf in Mellow Moss. The stamp company provides a placement line on the pencil stamp indicating the direction of the leaf, so it is very easy to position the image however you want your leaves to fall.

Finally, I stamped the Tiny Evergreen Branch in Always Artichoke. This is a good filler branch and really makes your image take shape! At this point, if you feel you need more flowers, you can add more color -- or not! It's up to you.

I then used two copic markers that added so much! I added a little bit of color to the pots (Y26-Mustard) and shaded the bottom of the pots with W1-Warm Gray, which added depth so the pots don't look like they are floating in air.

After centering and cutting my stamped image with a nestie, I left it in the nestie and stippled it. {this is where I would use an airbrush system if Santa ever brought one to me!} But the stipple brush trick is easy and I encourage you to try it! Nesties lend themselves so well to stenciling! On this particular stamped image, I stippled the top half with Soft Sky and the bottom half with River Rock. You can scroll back up to the finished cards to see the effect - so pretty!

I hope you enjoyed the Pottery Garden as much as I did! What a beautiful bang for your buck, in my opinion!