Midweek blog #177 - Inset stamping technique - creating an inset stamped image

 Hello & welcome. 

My name is Alison & I live in beautiful Melbourne, Australia. 

For those of you who have previously visited my blog & are now returning, thank you. For those of you who are here for the first time, welcome! 

 Here's a little bit about me. I love creating cards & gifts for my loved ones & this blog will show you how to create something special for those you love. I blog twice a week, once on a Sunday where I mainly showcase a stamp set or dies, embossing folders, projects & sometimes special DSP and Wednesday evenings when I highlight a technique, fun folds or tools & tips. I would love to hear from you if you have any questions or suggestions & my email address for that is craftedbyalison@gmail.com. Throughout this post there will be some links to my online store if you would like to purchase any of the products I feature. Just click on the blue hyperlinks & it will take you directly to my store.

If you follow my blog you will know that last week I was celebrating my retirement (& catching up with a friend from England) by having a week on the lovely, warm Gold Coast. It was such a relaxing & enjoyable break but now I am home again to my kids & grandpuppies & ready to enjoy more time to create & share my love of paper crafting.

This week I have a fun technique to share with you that I first saw on a Youtube video by Stamping with Diane. She called it Set Back Stamping but I prefer to call it Inset Stamping.

It's a process of stamping an image twice then diecutting one out & raising it with dimensionals over the other image. Here's what I mean...

To create this technique you really need to have a stamping platform of some description to make sure that the two images are aligned properly. I'll now take you through the steps I used to create this lovely card.

Using some scratch paper I placed one piece of 10cm x 14.45cm Basic White thick cardstock on my Stamparatus® & placed some light marks for where the card will sit when stamping.

I then cut an 8cm x 8cm piece to place over the top. I left an even margin around the 8cm piece & lightly adhered it in place with some washi tape. 

I stamped the image over the two pieces of cardstock then removed the 8cm piece & stamped the image again on the base matte. You do need to be careful at this step to make sure that the base matte hasn't moved or you will have an overlap of the image. How do I know? Yup, I didn't check & it had moved, leaving me with an out of focus image. No biggy though as I simply turned it over & restamped it.

The next step was to colour in the bottom image with Stampin' Blends®. I used Lemon Lolly, Peach Pie, Timid Tiger, Tahitian Tide (retired), Granny Apple Green & Old Olive.

I then cut a piece of Timid Tiger cardstock at 8.5cm x 8.5cm to back the smaller image & lightly attached the two. These were run through the Stampin' Cut & Emboss machine & the Mixed Florals dies which cut out the image but left the frame of the image. I then cut out the image from some Foam Adhesive Sheets & carefully applied it to the back of the frame. The diecut pieces will be used for another project - perhaps the reverse of today's post? I'll let you know when I've created it!

The next step was to adhere the base matte to the Timid Tiger base. The sentiment from the Beautiful Butterflies stamp set is heat embossed in black then fussy cut & adhered. It just gives a slight 3D effect.

The frame is attached next, centreing it evenly then the final step is a few 2025-27 In Colour Flat Pearls.

I love how this technique turned out & will definitely make more like this in the future as I have a card swap soon & this technique would be perfect.

That's it for this blog. I hope you enjoyed it.

My next blog is on Sunday & I will be creating using a punch as the main focus then next week's mid week blog shares another way to use up scrap strips of DSP.

I hope you can join me for both of them.

Til next time, take care & keep creating! XX Alison