Kissing 101

Well…I did it. I broke down and finally ordered an Ott-Lite. The lighting in my house is so bad…and when I hold classes, some spots at my dining room table are just SO dark. And my fabulous $9.99 Ikea floor lamp has broken off its base after being hauled back and forth to and from my craft room so many times (what do you expect for a lamp under 10 bucks?).

So those who take my classes…you now have good lighting to look forward to!

Speaking of classes – tomorrow I’m teaching one in a series of stamping technique classes. We’re covering some basic and advanced stamping techniques 3 or 4 at a time in a really quick 1-hour-or-less class on Sunday afternoons. All the techniques are put onto tags and go onto a key ring (given at the first class attended) so they’ll be a quick and easy reference when we’re all done the classes.

So tomorrow, we’re learning about ‘kissing’ – appropriate right before Valentine’s Day, don’t you think? I thought I’d share some of the samples here to show the basics of kissing – and to convince you to take more of my classes in the future. 🙂

Basic kissing involves taking a large, inked stamp with a small pattern and using it as an ‘ink pad’ for a smaller stamp with a solid image. Here, I’ve used the solid flower from Office Accoutrements (coming in the Spring Mini – just a teaser here!) and kissed it onto Canvas which had been inked with Vintage Violet ink.

The result is at the bottom – a flower with a canvas pattern. Here is the same flower stamp kissed in the same way to various backgrounds:

Clockwise from top left, that’s Paisley, Fine Lace, French Script and the diamond pattern stamp from Looks Like Spring (the stamp doesn’t have to be a large background stamp – it just needs to be larger than the solid stamp).

You’ll notice that the letters and words in the French Script sample are backwards. When you kiss, you get the mirror image of the background stamp you’re kissing to.

In case you’ve never noticed, Stampin’ Up! has solved this problem with two stamp sets made just for kissing – Letter Prints and Letter Patterns. If you look closely at these stamp sets, you’ll notice that the text is backwards – but when you kiss to them:

The text is correct. Here I’ve kissed “K” from Headline Alphabet to the text stamp from Letter Prints using Real Red ink. By the way, if you look at this stamp closely, you’ll notice that the text is the story of Stampin’ Up! – just a little trivia for ya’.

Kissing can also be used to remove ink from a inked, solid stamp in order to create a pattern such as this:

I inked Big Blossom with Vintage Violet ink then randomly stamped the little flower image from Springtime Stems on top of the inked stamp to remove the ink from those portions. The result is a very subtle image.

Finally, here’s a use for kissing that I wish I had used when I did my Love Letter Box (see my previous post). When I stamped the birds from Carte Postale, they both faced the same way. But there’s a way to fix that with mirror image kissing…

Stamp your first image (I used the bird from Carte Postale in this example) onto cardstock – you may want to stamp-off first so that the color is not as bright (the kissed image will be a little lighter).

Next, ink the bird stamp again and then stamp the image onto a large, solid stamp. In this case, I used the square stamp from Simple Shapes, but you can use any large, clean solid part of a stamp (I could have even used Big Blossom for this example). You’re using the solid stamp basically as a transfer method – and on another side note…a friend of mine picked up a stamp specifically for this technique at AC Moore the other day – it was basically just a big, solid rectangle stamp with no image. It was in the clearance bin – probably because people didn’t know exactly how to use it – but now YOU do…

So…next, stamp that solid stamp with the inked bird on it onto cardstock and voila:

The second bird faces the other way.

And you can see how very messy my Real Red ink pad is! I use it a lot, obviously…

Well, that’s it for Kissing 101. See – don’t you want to take one of my classes now? 😉