Workshop at The Stampman

Last Saturday my friend Jo and I travelled up to Skipton for a workshop at The Stampman shop with a lovely and talented lady called Jill Boulton.

In the morning we made a pretty little canvas using pretty paper, paint dabbers, sticky backed canvas, grungepaper and all manner of stamps. I didn't quite get mine finished at the workshop (I rarely do) but have done so at home and because of this I've used a couple of word stamps I had and a butterfly from the Elusive Images Butterfly Bliss themeplate, which I stamped onto acetate with Stazon and then added glitter to the back. I also highlighted the flowers stamped directly onto the canvas with my Inkssentials pen.

Some of the flowers and leaves were stamped onto Grungepaper and then spritzed with Moonshadow Inks and others were stamped onto sticky backed canvas which were then either spritzed with inks or painted with dabbers. We also stuck the canvas to metal sheets before cutting them out which enabled us to shape the leaves a bit. When I got home I decided to emboss my metal as well which gave even more shape to the flowers.

I really enjoyed doing this little canvas and I think I'm going to add a card to the back and give it to my Mum for her birthday later this month.

In the afternoon we played with the Melt Pot and tried out several different techniques, including placing molds over pictures chosen from magazines and pouring clear Utee (slightly tinted with ink). These would make nice brooches. We used the same technique pouring the Utee over a picture cut out and fitted into a slide mailer (this was my favourite). We marbled two colours together and poured it over a large textured stamp, poured another colour onto a craft mat and pressed a previously inked stamp into the puddle and finally dropped a square of cardboard into melted black, took it out of the Melt Pot and dusted patches of Moonshadow Mica Powders all over. We then melted the surface with a heat gun and then pressed an inked background stamp into it. All this was great fun, gave me lots of ideas and made me determined to get my Melt Pot out of the cupboard where it has been languishing for the past year.

All in all, I had a lovely day. I had good company whilst driving up to Skipton and because I chose not to take the motorways we saw some beautiful scenery. We shared the workshop with two other lovely ladies plus The Stamp'lady' herself Jill Tuck. Thankyou Jill for helping to make it a really good day out and thanks also to Ian (The Stampman) for fetching the bacon and sausage butties at lunchtime.