Compressed Sponge Stamping

Have you ever heard of Compressed Sponge?

It's a way cool and very fun material that I like to use to create funky background paper, wrapping paper and gift bags!

If you've never seen it before the sponge material comes compressed into a very thin wafer.

I bought the "scraps" bag...smaller pieces in all sorts of sizes at Michael's quite some time ago. You can purchase full 8 1/2"x11" sheets if you need a larger piece for a particular project or 3x4" packages as well. I've seen them at Kmart, on Create For Less, Amazon, etc.

Now I've used it 3 different ways which I am going to share with you but you may have some other ideas in mind...if you do, please feel free to share! I'm always up for new ways to use my goodies :)

First ~ Free-Hand...you can free hand cut any shape you can think of. Since it's compressed it's very easy to cut with regular scissors. No special tools needed!

Second ~ Stamped & Trimmed....


1. Stamp an image onto the sponge material using Archival Ink.

2. Cut the image out and saturate it with water...this is the BEST part. It's so much fun to watch the sponge grow ~ Yes, I'm like a little kid ;)

3. Stamp the image with acrylic paint onto your cardstock, wrapping paper, gift bag, etc. and let it dry. If desired you could use the paper as it is or since we used a stamp for the design you could continue on to step #4.

4. (optional) Apply acrylic paints to the original stamp as shown.... I used a darker color of yellow for the petals than I used with the sponge image.

and stamp over the sponge image....

Third ~ Die-Cut....since this material is so thin you can die cut it!!

Here are just a few pieces I cut with my Sizzix dies & Big Kick cutter.

TIP: You can use both the positive cut image as well as the negative!!

and the cool images you get from them...

As I mentioned before this is perfect for making background paper, wrapping paper and gift bags. Since it's so much fun and so very easy it's the perfect activity to include your children or grand kids. They LOVE to watch the sponges grow and since you use acrylic paints clean up is a snap!

So what do you think?

Looks like fun doesn't it?

Would you like a bit of material to play with?

If you do just post here...

I'll send a sheet to the first 15 people who post!