MARGARET'S MUSINGS:  If you have had an opportunity to see our display at anytime over the past few years, you would have seen sample cards by our friend Margaret Appleton. Margaret is always trying something new, and comes up with some great effects with our stamps. She has agreed to write a short piece for each newsletter on stamping in general and on techniques slightly beyond the basics.

I used the smaller shadow stamp and my metallic inks to stamp "random rectangles" all over a piece of navy blue cardstock. I overstamped some of the shapes. That step is enough to give you a neat background and now you can stamp a main image over top using navy ink or stamp an image on to another small piece of paper and then mount it to the metallic background. That can all be mounted to white or whatever you choose.

I decided to go one more step so I cut the metallic background into strips about ¾" wide. I mixed the strips up, stamped navy blue stars on to each of the strips and then mounted them to a piece of white cardstock( showing white spaces between the strips and a white border all around). I mounted that to a navy piece and then to a copper piece. Across the front of the whole thing I attached a piece of softly coloured vellum upon which I had stamped a greeting using navy ink and clear embossing powder. I used gold star brads to attach the vellum.

The "random rectangles" can be stamped on to dark paper with a watermark pad and each time have Pearl Ex powder applied . That makes a wonderful background. You can also stamp metallic shapes by stamping with Encore or Brilliance ink and use those as a background.

Using the large shadow stamp, try applying different coloured metallic inks in different places all over the rubber. Then stamp on to a piece of dark paper. For this and for each time I used metallic ink on my stamps I "misted" the inked rubber after the initial stamping and was able to get 1 or 2 more stampings out of that ink. Either apply it to the project you are working on or have another paper close by and "clean" all that metallic ink off the stamp on to the other paper and then use it for a background on another card. The ink is far too wonderful to wipe off and waste. I placed my first stamping slightly off the center of a piece of black cardstock and then misted and stamped all around the edges.

The pointed corners of the stamp pads can be used to apply ink just around the edges of the shadow stamp rubber. They end up looking like stegasurus spikes all around the edge! When you then stamp on to dark cardstock you have an image with an open area in the center because there was no ink on the stamp. That open area is a great place to stamp a greeting of some sort or a smaller image or whatever. The points that are applied around the edge of the shadow stamp do not all have to be the same colour.

So there are a few more thoughts about my current favourite stamp.  Happy Shadow Stamping!   - Margaret