The Great Stamping Controversies of Modern Times

I love reading about stamping controversies.

Every year, there's a stamp set or two that generates a kerfuffle and it's great entertainment.

There was Tardis-gate, when the whole world was up in arms that some of us colored the phone box in the Feeling Sentimental stamp set BLUE - horrors - so that we could make Dr. Who cards. There were lengthy pronouncements about how police boxes and call boxes were DIFFERENT and NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. God forbid a stamper ask a viewer for a little creative license - IT'S NOT ALLOWED. STAMPING IS SCIENCE, NOT ART. (Apparently.)

There's snowflake-gate too - nearly every year, when some cheeky artist takes liberty with a snowflake and ONLY GIVES IT FIVE SIDES! Institutions around the world immediately collapse, and all human knowledge is sucked into a black hole created by cards with five or eight sided snowflakes. Cards with these heretical approximations of real snowflakes are burned upon receipt, and their ashes are sprinkled with holy water, to keep their evil spirits from returning.

For some reason, the hordes of legless butterflies don't seem to generate the same amount of ire. Nor do animals in clothes, pigs that stand up, or stars which look nothing like actual stars. What about floating baby heads? Spiders with long eyelashes? Those, apparently are all kosher.

We are very selective in our application of scientific details to stamped images. Stampers are quirky like that.

I observe no rules in my art, so I watch these scandals emerge with great amusement. Maybe I'll take some time this week to make a blue callbox card with five sided snowflakes twinkling around it. I'll refer you to my post on dogma for a refresher on irreverence.

What will the next stamping controversy be, I wonder? Or maybe you know of some I haven't heard of yet - if so, feel free to share!

I've been obsessing over my MISTI still. This thing has so many tricks. The trick that sold me on the thing in the first place was the ability to correct mis-inking errors. I was actually using it on this card to align the flowers from Painted Petals with the "smile" from So You, when I realized that because I was stamping on watercolor paper, the ink was blotchy on the first stamping.

All I had to do was re-ink and stamp again a few times to get smooth coverage. Since the stamp and paper are always in the exact same place, it's just flat out awesome.

Now to get the sentiment aligned in the first place, I just put my ruler inside the MISTI to give me a straight edge to line "smile" up on.

Then after stamping that a few times until the ink was perfect, I arranged the flower stamps around the sentiment where I wanted them, picked them up with the lid and then stamped them in white and embossed them. I used Daffodil Delight, Tempting Turquoise, Baked Brown Sugar and Lucky Limeade reinkers to watercolor the background. Then I used a little glue and some microbeads for the centers.

I've been binge watching Cutthroat Kitchen this weekend, trying to empty out my DVR. It just struck me that this show is GREAT at breaking down cooking dogma for a group of people who are notorious for being somewhat dogmatic - chefs.

When someone has to make a turkey dinner with no turkey, or create a vegetarian version of French Onion soup, they have to leave their notions of some of the most basic foods behind and just get crackin' for the scant time they have to cook in.

So don't let that little wonky snowflake get in your way. What if all the other snowflakes made fun of him because he was different? Wouldn't you feel terrible for rejecting him because he's missing a leg? Just make something pretty with your special, special snowflake!

Loveyameanitbye.