Tips Corner

Adhesive: Well most of you know I'm not addicted to Dotto. I love it and mostly love the repositionable as I can change my mind and it resicks. Now as with almost any adhesive, a little goes a long way. I usually hit the corners and a dot in the center whether it's double stick tape, tape runners. For some reason I do tend to adhere almost the entire piece when using glue sticks. When using glue sticks, give it two swipes for a good stick and forget trying to pull it back up.

Markers:
When using most markers, store them on their side as most have ink that will flow from the brush end to the fine point. If you find it's dry on one end, you may want to stand on end so ink flows to the other end.

Marker going dry:
With the Stampin Up markers, you can use tweezers to pull out, carefully, the brush end, lay on your stamp pad of the same color and add reinker. Use tweezers to pick up and put back into the marker casing. Viola, you are refilled for a while. Now as to how to get ink to the fine point, I usually stand the marker on end so that some of that ink will flow down to the fine point end.

Rubber:
1. Excess rubber from popping out your rubber stamps for mounting. I use the left over pieces under flower pots or anything that might scuff my tables.
2. The pieces can be any rubber bumper pads.
3. Small pieces behind picture frames are great to keep them straight on the walls.
4. Larger pieces can actually be scored with exacto blade to make your own background stamp.
5. Use as a pop dot or dimensional for a project or card. Cut to size, remove the rubber and use the foam part that's left as your pop dot.

Cardstock scraps:
1. keep hands busy and punch out images while watching tv.
2. Have a lot of strips. Run some cardstock thru xyron with adhesive and adhere the strips for a neat piece of background paper.
3. If thin enough, pretty cool to make punches in bottom of a card and run the strips thru as if it were ribbon, in case you are out of ribbon.
Be resourceful. Those are pennies that add up.

Daubing (adding color) around your cards:
Daubers: I love using a dauber that comes in sets of 12 from Stampin Up. I prefer to hold my hand, fingers behind the piece I'm daubing for support and then I put the dauber on my finger and just bounce the color off. Guess I may need to do a picture to show you.

Round Sponge: These come in sets of 3 and you can cut to get 12 sponges/wedges. The texture of the sponges allows for some very soft backgrounds and edges. You'll get a totally different look and more controlled. You can mush it to form a round ball. The lighter the touch the softer the look. You can always add more but hard to remove it.

Backgrounds: I love making background paper. Save decent scraps of white, vanilla, or even some color. Get creative.

When you have finished stamping, use the ink left on that stamp to blot off onto the paper. Turn your hands around so the image is in different directions. Over time, with several colors, stamps, you'll have some unusual paper.

I love inking up background stamps by using a brayer. Run your brayer several times over the ink pad, in one direction... not back and forth. Then run the brayer over the stamp and it's inked and uses less ink and less damage to your stamp pad. Now this brayer is loaded with ink so don't waste it. Run it over that leftover cardstock in different directions for some great soft suede looking background paper in that color.