Tutorial

Hey everyone! Kinsey here with my first ever SC tutorial and it's all about making your own ink pads with Mister Hueys. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at those pretty little bottles of spray mist and longed for stamp ink in the exact same colors. I love that the mists coordinate perfectly with the papers and embellishments, so it's really handy to have an ink pad version on hand when you need that perfect shade of bonny blue, right?! For my example project, I used the Boardwalk kit because I love the variations of greens, aquas, and blues- and the exclusive stamp is perfect for showing off how well the Mister Huey's work as an ink. Here's a close up of the finished product...

So let's talk methods...the first is definitely the fastest and easiest- it's the Cut-n-Dry stamp pad foam or felt by Inkssentials.

It comes in an 8 x 10 inch sheet in either foam or felt. For my demo I used the foam version and loved that after each use, I could rinse it out, let it dry and reuse it; or just put it in a ziploc baggie for later use. Another cool factor- you can make a 4 x 6 ink pad for your SC background stamps and ink the entire stamp in one step without running the risk of missing a spot and ending up with a blotchy image.

To use the Cut-n-Dry stamp pad, just use a pair of scissors, cut a stamp pad to size, spray 2 pumps of mist onto the pad and stamp like usual...easy right?!

The second method I used is a little bit more time intensive but the idea is pretty similar...for this approach, I raided my daughter's craft felt supply and cut it up into smaller pieces and then spray with a few pumps of Mister Huey's and stamp...

I did notice that because the craft foam is so light, it would stick to the stamp as I was inking it so I made a make-shift stamp pad base for the felt pads (see photo above). I just cut a piece of acrylic to about 2.5 x 3.5 inches and then added the 'crunchy' side of a piece of self-adhesive velcro that the felt sticks to during stamping.

I keep all of the pads stored by color in 4 x 6 inch ziploc bags on a binder ring and love that they don't take up a bunch of space.

One last method that I recently saw on the SC message board, uses the Tim Holtz Ink Blending tool in lieu of a stamp pad...you can read more about Joanne's (aka spagirl) awesome approach here.

Here's one last look at the full finished layout:

Can you tell that I used both of the stamp pad methods here? (I used the foam pad with the lunchtray, pickle, bonny blue, and barnwood Mister Huey's and the felt pad with the clover, warm calico, and gable green)