Rose Garden

What can I say? I just love simple outline flower stamps. So simple and clean, just waiting to be colored a million different ways. I chose to gold emboss this trio of flowers, because I loved Michelle Wooderson's gold Larkspurs featured on her blog yesterday, and wanted to try it myself with these. Admittedly, my gold embossing powder is VERY old, and I suppose it does go bad over such a long period of time. It did not want to emboss very easily, and I almost burned the paper! Time to add new gold embossing powder to my next shopping trip, in preparation for Thanksgiving and Christmas! 

I colored the flowers in with my colored pencils, and one thing I learned about coloring/blending with colored pencils recently is that the smoother the paper I use, the lighter the colors appear. I usually use Bristol vellum, which has a tiny bit of 'tooth' to it, so I can really build up the colors in as many layers as I want, which I can't do easily on smooth paper.

I figured this out because I always tried to print my digi stamps on Neenah or Heavenly White heavy white cardstock, but the paper did NOT want to go through my printer. I would have try over and over to get it to feed through, and eventually I'd get lucky and it would finally print. Well, this was a huge waste of time, so I opted to get the lighter weight Heavenly White cardstock to print my digi's on. Worked beautifully. So I was printing some digi's a couple of weeks ago, thinking I would color them with Copics, but changed my mind at the last minute and opted for my colored pencils. I didn't think it would work very well, but surprisingly, I liked it. The colors blended much more smoothly and were much lighter. Actually it was kind of hard to get really deep shading, so I have to keep that in mind. But for soft, pale colors, it was perfect.

See, I do learn something new all the time in my rubber stamping adventures, despite how long I've been doing this! It's why I always try to remember to experiment. Despite what I've been taught by the many tutorials and lessons available out there, if there's something I wonder about, I just have to try it and see. Sometimes, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Stamps: Stampin Up
Ink: Versamark
Paper: Heavenly White, Basic Grey, Memory Box, SU, Stardream
Accessories: Martha Stewart edge punch & ribbon, colored pencils, OMS, gold embossing powder, Spellbinders Labels