What can you do with one stamp?

I have been a rubber stamper for something like 20 years! I think the thing that fasinatinated me about the craft of stamping was that I could take one stamp and basically make it my own. I could experiment with different papers, different colors, different coloring mediums and my image would have a completely different look each time. OR...if I needed to make multiples of the same card for an invitation or a number of thank you cards, for example, I could stamp this same image as many times as I wanted without it costing my more money! You can tell, I fell in love with how versatile stamping can be.
So, I took the large butterfly from the Flaming Butterfly set by Nikki Sivils, Scrapbooker to work with and I want to share some of what I came up with.

You can see that I created my background paper for my card by stamping one of the little butterflies in the set repeatedly on a piece of white cardstock. I didn't color in anything for this card, instead when I had stamped all of my butterflies with a Black Versafine stamp pad, I embossed all of them with clear embossing powder and then gave this piece a few spritzes of Glimmer Mist by Tattered Angels. I used two different colors of spray and then inked the outside edges of my piece with a turquoise blue Fluid Chalk stamp pad.

Now, when I stamped the large butterfly my challenge was to stamp the butterfly on some kind of paper so that I wouldn't have to color any of it in. I picked this great, kraft colored cardstock and stamped the butterfly once, again with the Versafine black stamp pad and embossed it with the clear embossing powder. Next I took a page from an old dictionary and stamped the butterfly again and embossed this one with the clear. For this second butterfly, I didn't cut out all of the image. I left off all of the outside layers of it's wings. I gently curled the wings on the second butterfly and then glued that in place over the first one, glueing it just down the middle so the wings were free. The green background paper on the card is also from the Flaming Butterfly collection.

For this card, I wanted to use this piece of patterned paper from the Flaming Butterfly collection for the background of my card but I wanted the butterfly to have soft colors.
I colored it with Copic markers, using very pale shades of the colors and I added some Aleene's Paper Glaze to the middle sections of the butterfly for some added interest. When this Paper Glaze is dry, it gives a 3-D, epoxy look.

This buttefly has rather soft shades of the colors too with an added interest.

After I colored it with Copic markers, I filled in all of the middle sections with Ultra Fine Flower Soft. Can you see the wonderful texture that gave my butterfly? The card base is Core'dinations cardstock. The lines were created with a Scor-Pal tool and then these lines were sanded.

I loved being your host today and I hope I showed you some fun ways to use your stamps!!!

Thanks for visiting, Linda Beeson