Who knew Gelli could be so much fun

Hello crafty friends, I'm sharing with you today some cards that I have made using Crafters Companion "inspirational sayings" stamps which launch tomorrow on Hochanda. I bought some lovely stamps with beautiful uplifting sayings on them from Lylly of the Valley ages ago and they have proved very useful over the years but they only sell them as digi downloads now so I was more than delighted when Crafters Companion sent me these fabulous stamps.

 

What you need:

Crafters Companion, Inspirational Sayings stamps

Crafters Companion, Sheena, Take Your Leaf stencil

 Crafters Companion, Sheena,Dissolving Planets stencil

Crafters Companion, Sheena,A Leaf of Graph Paper stencil

Sheena Stamping Card

Gelli Plate

water based (distress inks)

I have chosen these three cards because I made them using a gelli plate which is in my case is an A4 piece of gelli which I presume is silicone and it allowing me to do mono printing which is building up an image or background one layer at a time. I found loads of tutorials on Youtube which were really helpful and inspiring. The nature of this technique means that every print you make is unique, so I could probably make something like these cards again using the same colours but no two would be the same.
Basically I used distress inks and a brayer to create a background colour on the gelli plate and took a print of this onto Sheena stamping card. You clean your roller in between each print by rolling it onto a scrap piece of paper but this can create a good background effect too so dont just throw it away at the end. Then I just dabbed colour direct onto the plate from the ink pad and either blended it in a bit with the roller (or not) and then took a print from this onto the original background printed card. With card No 3 I laid the stencil onto the gelli plate and inked over it, then I removed the stencil and stamped some non specific writing onto the gelli plate (I would not recommend stamping words onto a gelli plate as it will print the words backwards) I then took a print of this. For card No 2 I inked up the square under side of the ink pad lid and stamped this onto the gelli plate and took a print of this. For Cards 1 and 2 I used the stencils as normal and inked over them direct onto the printed card.
Card No 3 was finished off by stamping the sentiment and then using a top from a pot of embossing powder to stamp the circles, I then coloured inside the circles with white ink. Card No 1 was finished off by adding a few butterflies which were die cut using the chic butterflies dies from Crafters Companion.

I had so much fun using the Gelli plate and cant wait to get it out again. The sayings in this set of stamps are so uplifting and are a nice size to use on a card or tag, something else I think I will go to again and again in the future.