Random Stamping Tutorial

"Come on, now", I hear you say, "why do we need a tutorial on random stamping. Isn't it supposed to be, well RANDOM!" Well, yes and no. random stamping is supposed to be random and hopefully will still look that way but to get it looking really great takes just a wee bit of planning. Because we are used to so many straight lines, our random stamping tends to end up like that, no longer looking random. I suppose if we all lived in the woods and looked at fewer things that are perfectly straight, this might now happen. Any whoo, here goes. To see the final project, click HERE. (I posted it over the post with the baby gift card holder I decided wasn't worthy!)

The tricks to this are always stamping in triangles and stamping off the page when necessary.

Step 1. (click on any photo to see it larger) Stamp one image in the top corner. Stamp another near it, not directly beside or directly below or at 45 degrees to the first. I may have broken my own rule, I think this may be close to 45 degrees. OOPS! But how much space do you leave? That depends on how dense you want the stamped images and whether or not you want other images to go in between later. For a looser stamping, Leave 1 - 1.5 times the stamp width, for a tighter grouping, leave half the stamp width. Closer stamping is very hard with stamps that have a distinct shape rather than being mostly circular, square or oval, like words. one way to handle these is to rotate the stamp a bit with each stamping. If you are using more than one stamp, always stamp the larger images first. The smaller images will fit between a set of three larger ones.

Step 2.  So now we have a third image. Notice it is roughly equal distance to each of the other two. Try to keep all the distances roughly the same (after all, it is random stamping!). Refer back to the original three stampings if you need to, especially if you are stamping a large project with a small stamp.

Step 3. Continue to add more stamps in the same manner.

Be sure to stamp some off the edges of the page. If you wish, you can see that there is room for a smaller stamp in between each triangle. You do not need to stamp in between in each triangle however. To see the whole project and 'recipe', click here.

HTH, Enjoy, Rebecca