Sweet Choo Choo

  I hope everyone had a good weekend.  Our weather here was kind of crazy on Saturday, sunny, windy then got stormy with rain and hail.  Sunday was beautiful and I'm looking forward to a warm sunny week!  It might be hard to stay in the stamp room with 70 degree weather!

  Here is another project my stamp club made last week.  I have had the Choo Choo set for quite a while and have only used it on a few projects and never for a class so I thought it was high time to break it out!  That, and I had a few of my stamping ladies ask about using wheels.  I have to admit I've always been a little bit "wheel-phobic" even when I was just a customer.  So I decided to take the plunge and ordered the Stampin' Around wheel guide and some uninked cartridges (page 193 in the catalog) to use with my one wheel.  I figured I needed to practice before my stamping ladies could have a go at it.  I found that if you just follow a few simple steps the wheels are super easy to use.  1) make sure you've inked your cartridge really well.  I had to do it several times as it just kept absorbing ink but now it's nice and juicy.  2) practice with the wheel guide a few times on scrap paper before using it on your project 3) standing up was key for me getting a nice even image  4) steady pressure all the way across the project.  We wheeled along the bottom of the card front as well as on the Whisper White insert inside the card.

  Another trick that I showed my ladies was to make your own Stamp-a-ma-jig image sheet for wood mounted sets that you always want to have lined up just so.  I found that maybe I didn't use Choo Choo as often as I would have liked because I would have to dig out the Stamp-a-ma-jig and use it for every single train car (and I would always smear some ink on my hand somehow and it would end up on my project!).  I used a 4 x 4 square cut from the thick Window Sheets (page 205 in the catalog), used the black T part of the SAMJ, and black Stazon ink.  I just stamped the train cars on the window sheet like you would normally do for the SAMJ just using Stazon so it would be permanent.  I put one train car in each corner of the window sheet and it fits right into the stamp case.  Now I line everything up really quickly without having to clean the window sheet between each use!  Pretty cool huh?  Go ahead and see which sets you've been neglecting and make your own SAMJ imaging sheet.

  The rest of this card is pretty simple, used some free Sale-a-Bration rewards for the embellishments (aren't you sad SAB is over and we have to wait another year to get all those great freebies??) and some Basic Gray ink stamped 4 times without re-inking for the smoke. 

  Thanks for looking!  Did you stamp today?

Stamps: Choo Choo, Right on Track (wheel)

Ink: Pacific Point, Daffodil Delight, Melon Mambo, Basic Gray


Paper: Pacific Point, Daffodil Delight, Whisper White

Accessories: Ice Cream Parlor Ribbon & Button pack (SAB), wheel handle, wheel ink cartridge, glue dots, window sheets, Stamp-a-ma-jig