Sentiments of the Season Blog Hop- Tutorial and Giveaway

Welcome to the Quietfire Sentiments of the Season Blog Hop! We’re celebrating the season with projects using our favorite Quietfire sentiment stamps and dies. We have some great ideas to share with you!

We’re giving away a prize on each of the Sentiments of the Season blog posts. The posts will be on Designers’ personal blogs and one on Quietfire Creations. All you have to do is leave a comment on the Sentiments of the Season blog posts and you will be entered for a chance to win a Quietfire stamp or die from that blog. Each designer will randomly choose the winner from their comments.

Here is our schedule: 

Day 1- Monday November 23 : Teresa and Yogi
Day 2 -Tuesday November 24: KathyJo and Judi Kauffman
Day 3 - Wednesday November 25: Wanda and Yvonne
Day 4 - Thursday November 26: Robyn and Selma
Day 5 - Friday November 27: Diana and Suzanne

The deadline for leaving comments is Sunday November 29, 2015 at midnight PST. Winners will be posted shortly afterwards here on Quietfire Creations. Good luck and have fun!

For the Blog Hop I thought I would share some new techniques for your dies. As many of you know, I am a huge die junkie. Dies are so fun to use and sometimes I spend hours just running dies through my machine to try out new materials or layouts.

Today I want to share die techniques that do not involve embossing or cutting, but how to use your dies as stamps. Quietfire dies are so beautiful…why limit them to only die cutting and embossing? This post is a long one so grab a cup of tea and enjoy!

Before we start:
* Make sure your die is clean and all paper tidbits are removed from the die.
* It is best to work with thinner, flexible papers- card board and heavy weight paper (such as 110lb) may be too heavy. Textured surfaces should be avoided. When in doubt, test it out.
* Place your material on a flexible stamping mat. Stamps are flexible to help with stamping- dies are stiff and need flex under the paper.
* Remember to clean your die after stamping. You don’t want to ruin future die cut items by covering them with ink.
* Although dies can be “stamped”, you will not have lovely fine details like you would from an actual stamp. Keep that in mind when designing your project.

Die stamp setup:
You do not want your die permanently attached to a stamping block so only use a small amount of removable tape on the back of your die. Here was my initial setup:

I placed my die on a block with removable tack tape. My whole block was covered with the tape so it was removable…but was very tricky to get off one time. I do not recommend using this setup if your block is super tacky.

Just to re-iterate: You want to avoid bending your die so limit the amount of removable tape used. A small amount of removable tape will make the removal process easier and will protect your die.

Die Stamping- Vellum:
Just like with a stamp, Archival Ink works well on vellum. Apply the Archival Ink onto the die stamp setup. Test the image on a scrap piece of paper. You may want to test a few times to figure out your pressure required. After stamping on the vellum you may notice some ink transferred in addition to your die lines. Use a Q-tip and some stamp cleaner solution on the vellum to remove the stray ink. Dry with a heat gun.

You could just leave the image as is but I chose to emboss on the back side of the vellum. It created a nice embossed image with a black outline.

Die stamping- Chalkboard:
The Quietfire dies work perfectly for your chalkboard paper project. After cleaning the die, heavily apply Versamark. Stamp the die on black paper and heat emboss using white embossing powder. The letters on my example were scribbled in with Sakura’s Souffle gel pens:

I really liked the way the chalkboard style turned out. The partially filled in letters look very cool against the black background. (Please note that if you are looking for stamps in the same style, check out Quietfire’s Fill 'er-up series.)

A peek at the inside- more of the patterned papers and "Merry Christmas" Quietfire stamped sentiment.

Die Stamping- Watercolor:
The chalkboard style was awesome but watercoloring turned out to be my favorite style for die stamping. After playing for some time with the watercolor technique, I decided to mix up my stamping. For the below card I created a watercolor background using Barn Door, applied a wee bit of water in the center (to lighten the watercolor) and then heat dried. Next I applied Archival Ink in Coffee onto the die, stamped and then heat dried. Merry Christmas was stamped over the Believe using Jet Black Archival Ink and heat dried. Note that I stamped the Believe and Merry Christmas over the lighter colored red area for emphasis. On a craft mat, mix Barn Door, Vintage Photo and water. Apply the watercolor mix inside the Believe letters.

The seam binding was dyed using the leftover ink from mixture above. My hands were an inky mess at this point but I did not care because I having a blast playing in the craft room!

I do hope you liked the die stamping exploration…I know I enjoyed playing with the dies! If you do make a project using the above techniques, please link back to this post. I will make sure to leave some love on your blog, too. Talking about leaving love, don’t forget to leave a comment for your chance to win a new stamp or die from Quietfire Design. Your next stop on this hop is the ever so talented Judi Kauffman.

Thanks for stopping by! Good luck!
Big Crafty Hugs,
Kathy Jo

The cards above are entered into the following challenges:
Simon Says Stamp Wednesday, Christmas
613 Avenue Create, AG
Word Art Wednesday, AG