Did you miss me?

Well my honoured reader, here I am back after a lull, and with new projects to share.

I was thinking of scrapping Scrap n Card Queen (in the sense of ditching it, rather than scrapbooking it) because it languishes at the bottom of the Crafty Blog listings, probably because I don't give anything away, and probably because I am the billy-no-mates of the crafting world (having never been to a crop).

But I enjoy putting it together and it's a good record of my creative endeavours so I will persevere.

Lately I have discovered the joys of mini books and I've been experimenting with Stampbord.

More on the mini books tomorrow.

Stampbord is 3mm thick smooth white board, created for stamping. It gives a clean, pristine finish and you can then use the special tools, one of which looks like a Brillo pad, to scratch away the paint or ink you have used to create detail, shadow and highlights. You can buy it from one of my favourite online craft stores, Craft Obsessions.

It's a lot of fun to use. I've only tried it on cards and scrapbook pages, but you can also turn it into jewellery.

Here are two cards I created. For both, first of all I used acrylic paint on the Stampbord, allowed it to dry, and then stamped my image on top. I used silver ink for the seashore stamp and a combination of gold and green inks for the leaves stamp. I then embossed with silver tinsel powder for the seashore stamp and clear embossing powder for the leaves stamp. Afterwards, I used the Stampbord tool that looks like an old-fashioned ink pen to scratch out some of the edging.

The seashore stamp is wonderful. It's by Stampington and comes in an innovative cube shape that has a different stamp for each facet. It took a while to arrive from the US but I can tell it's going to be a stamp I use often. I mounted the Stampbord into a turquoise card blank having trimmed a piece of BasicGray paper, topped by Lynn Perella for Stampington artist's paper.

The leaves stamp was free with Craft Stamper magazine. Each month you get a free stamp and they're very useful. The magazine is the only serious stamping title in the UK and features some great collages (and how to use Stampbord). Again, the paper I used was by Lynn Perella for Stampington. It makes me feel extremely smug when I source some US paper which I know very few crafters will have in the UK!