Ink Stains: Beer Garden

Today I wanted to share a couple cards I made using Rubber Stamp Tapestries new set of stamps called Beer Garden. It's a fun new set of Peg Stamps that includes hops vine, hops bud, beer stein and pretzels. I was very excited about this as there is someone not far from where I live that grows hops! It's always fun to see the vines climb up the wires during the summer and then see the flowers once they ripen hanging up high. They are really beautiful in their own way.

Today I wanted to share a fun way to create an interesting look by using layered dies as a stamping guide...check it out.

For this technique I am going to use alternating size circle dies to trace stamping lines on both a card and tag. The die set I'm using has 5 layered circles in the set so I'll be using #1 (largest), # 3 and #5 (smallest). You simply trace on a very light pencil line onto your substrate to follow while you stamp. Once the inks have dried you can erase the line where visible but much of the time they will fade beneath the stamped images so you don't even have to erase if you don't want to.

Here you can see that I stamped the hops vines over the lines.

And then I added the flowers to the vines.

I skipped the next size circle and went with the #3 circle die. I stamped the pretzels and beer steins on that line. Note I did have to erase the line where the beer steins are due to the lighter ink color I used.

I used the smallest circle die in the very corners and stamped the hops vine and flower. I then went back and colored each of the hops flowers with colored pencils.

Finally I stamped the sentiments using stamps from the sets Happy and Mom and Dad. I flicked on a bit of green and gold watercolor paints and after they had dried I added a bit of green ink around the edges to finish them off.