National Stamping Month Blog Hop

Close To My Heart is offering a beautiful kit (or just pieces of this kit!) for September, AKA National Stamping Month!  You're going to see some beautiful, creative ways to use all or part of this set (which consists of a beautiful stamp set and interactive card bases) along this blog hop.  (If you're already hopping, then you've probably arrived from Michelle's blog.  From here, you'll visit Gina next.)

My layout began with the beautiful new scrappbooking Workshops Your Way, Falling for You, and the From the Heart stamp set.  I selected a sketch from the NEW Make It from Your Heart, Vol. 3, pattern 25.

I love the Workshops Your Way because they include coordinating embellishments.  I did add Fern cardstock to complete my layout.  Scroll down for a tutorial on how I used the large stamps from this special stamp set on my layout and colored with a waterbrush.

On the right page, I used one of the journaling squares from the collection in the bottom right corner.

If you'd like to skip the tutorial, go on to Gina's blog next.

I really wanted to use the large flowers from the sentiment stamps on my layout but didn't think any of the sentiments fit for a scrapbook page.  There's an easy way to mask the parts that you don't want to use.  Grab some washi tape and cover the parts you don't want to stamp.

Next, ink up your stamp.  (I chose Charcoal to go with the Falling for You palette.)  Then pull the washi tape off carefully.  (Caution: You may get inky!)  Huff on your stamp (blow some of your hot breath on it) to reactivate the ink and then stamp directly onto your project.

 Voila!  I decided to color my images with the waterbrush.  I began with Saffron and turned my layout over so that I painted from the bottom of the flower toward the top so that the bottoms would be a bit darker.

To add more dimension to the flowers, I added some Golrush ink with the waterbrush.

Finally, I colored the berries with Nutmeg and the leaves with Fern.

I ended up adding some of the solid stamps to fill out the clusters and of course added those pretty bronze sequins.

 These flowers colored with Saffron and Goldrush.

Here's a close up of this finished cluster.

Thanks for reading this all the way to the end.  I would love a comment before you hop on over to Gina's blog!

{Click HERE for all the hop participants and their blogs.}

I'm also linking this up to the Three Amigos Blog Hop challenge #6: Falling for You.