Hi everyone! Gretchen here bringing you the May special releases for The Stamps of Life. There are three fabulous new stamp sets now available. They are patterns4pops, onesie4baby, and minabc2stamp.

Today I wanted to share a little bit more about the patterns4pops and miniabc2stamp sets.

Let’s start with patterns4pops. Remember the super cute May club release called pops2eat?

Well, patterns4pops was made just for that set. That means, you’ve got more patterns to use to fill in your fun popsicles to really give some extra detail and pop!

There are three large and three small different textures you can add to give your project some extra dimension. There are also 4 new sayings so you can really mix and match when creating. There is also a cute little heart included in this set (and a heart always seems to add just the right touch to any project!).

Details of the larger popsicles -

Details of the smaller popsicles -

Super cute right? Definitely a great addition to the pops2eat set.

Next I want to share the miniabc2stamp set and a little trick I do for making stamping out a lot of words at once easier.

One of the reasons I love this set is because it comes with lots of extra letters… doubles and triples of some. When you are adding words to a card or a title to a layout, this is very helpful.

Here’s my handy tip: I find it so much easier to place several letters on a block at once rather than to stamp one letter at a time. Decide what you want to stamp (I’m stamping “welcome to Create Scrapbooks”). Place as many letters on your block as you can. I’d used the three “e’s” so that was my stopping point.

Next, to make sure everything stays lined up, I like to leave the last letter in place. In this case I left the “t” and “r.” If you are at the end of the block, simply remove the letters, place them over your stamped letters, then pick them back up with the block, placing them more in the center with the new placement.

Leaving the end letters helps act as a guide and takes the guess work out of placement. This way you can just continue on with your word and keep everything all lined up. When it’s time to stamp, I remove the letters that have previously been stamped and then ink up the remaining letters.

Easy peasy!

What about those inks?

In the above example showing patterns4pops, I used some beautiful and vibrant dye inks. These are Stephanie Barnard’s Premium Ink Pads by Colorbox. I did a previous post about them but thought it was worth sharing the information again. Please check out my video for all the details.

Watch the video on YouTube – http://youtu.be/GJnvYNNkeMY

As always, we thank you for stopping by Create Scrapbooks and checking out the latest releases from The Stamps of Life!