Passport to Inspiration by Buttons

Hi everyone, and thank you for joining my for my last post as Guest Designer here at The Artistic Stamper Creative Team blog. I want to start by thanking the team for inviting me to contribute this month. A huge thank you as well to Emma who has been so supportive and encouraging throughout this time.

So I wanted to do something a bit different for my final piece and I suspect this may be a first here at The Artistic Stamper. Why? Well how many things are posted unfinished? Shock, horror!! What's the matter with you woman?! Actually it is designed to be a permanent 'work in progress'. Let me explain as I show you the completed pages.

Recently a few people have posted things they've created to get their mojo working when it takes an untimely break. Lots of these use words or products, but I'm the type who easily forgets 'recipes' for backgrounds and tends to respond to visual stimuli. So I decided to make a Passport to Inspiration to help me when the fog descends.


















I used several stamp sets from The Artistic Stamper range, going for a 'personal travel through time' theme throughout the book. These are listed at the bottom of this post, but I would like to make special mention of one - Journalling Mini Words. That's the one I've used on the first and fourth journal pages. I'm not sure if it is supposed to be used as individual words, but I was inspired by some of the altered dictionary/book pages I've seen recently which have highlighted one/several significant words from a page. So I kept it as a complete background stamp and used different portions of it depending on the words required.

The pages are actually they are wage packets which have been strung together at the unopened end and have inbuilt pockets to hold tags with recipes on them. Obviously each page is completely different but I try to ensure those which are paired are 'complimentary' so as not to spoil the look/feel.

Some of the pages (which measure 4" by 3.5") are more sparsely embellished than others. That may well change as time goes on but I wanted to make sure the background was the most visible thing. The one clear exception to this is the page above with the viewfinder die cut - I wanted to test my suspicion that the little stamp/postmark stamps were the perfect size to show through the windows - and they were!

As the pages are simply tied together there is plenty of room for expansion, and the plan is that if a background works I'll make an extra portion to put in the book. Then if I have an image/theme/embellishment without a background there will be somewhere to start in future.

I could have listed the 'ingredients' for each of these initial pages but to be honest thought that could be boring, so if you interested to find out more about any of them just leave me a comment or contact me on FB and I'll be glad to help out. Suffice to say I used a combination of Distress Paints, Distress Inks, Alcohol Inks, Archival Inks, my favourite Glue n Seal, WOW embossing powders (they are so good at picking up detail) Sizzix embossing folders, and Vintaj Patinas. The kitchen sink was also on standby to clean up regularly!!!

So there you have it. I would highly recommend taking a good look through the stamps which are unique to The Artistic Stamper (amongst the other things of course!) I have and will continue to find them extremely useful not just as focal elements but just as importantly for creating backgrounds. Once again many thanks to the team for inviting me to join them this month and thank you for your wonderful feedback.

Jenny Marples

Pushing The Right Buttons

Stamps used - Europe Map Background, Smudge Background, Postage No. 1, Small but Beautiful Gibson Girls, Round the World, Labels, Journalling Mini Words