Mini Easel Stamped Place Card (Pine Tree: Impression Obsession)
Easy Stamped Easel Place Cards
Stamping skills can be used for more than just greeting cards! How about using your stamps to create Christmas table place cards? In past years, I have just stamped a small holiday image of some kind on a little rectangle of decorative cardstock, written or typed the name of the dish on the card and laid it on the Christmas Eve buffet table near each food dish. It’s simple, quick to do and uses small bits of cardstock that would otherwise go to waste. This year, I have decided to refine things just a bit by creating little Mini Easel Place Cards for each food on the buffet table. With a table full of food, this might sound like a lot of work, but easel cards are surprisingly quick and easy to create. The only trick is figuring out the measurements for a smaller version. (And I’ll tell you a secret: that’s easy too!)
Due to my scene stamper background, I usually aim for realistic proportions when I choose images for a stamped card. If I want to use stamps of a person and a coffee cup, the stamped cup will be the right size to be realistically held in the hand of the stamped person. If the cup image I have is too large to look right in her hand, I’ll either reduce the cup image size or I’ll use perspective tricks to use the cup in a different way in the card or I’ll simply look for a different cup image. But sometimes it is fun to mix things up, play with image proportions and deliberately use images that don’t, at first glance, seem like they would work together.
In last Friday’s post about turning a line stamp into a silhouette stamp, I mentioned that the method I used created a flipped image (because the final silhouette uses the back of the stamped image rather than the front.) This of course means that words would wind up reversed.
This morning I got to thinking about working with word stamps and thought I’d try cutting away the stamped text to create a cut-out background instead. In this case, I’m not really turning a line stamp into a silhouette because my text stamp had simple thick solid lines, but I liked the way it turned out. As Robyn pointed out in the comments on my Friday post, if you have a digital cutter, you could use that to cut out a stamp to create this result much more quickly. But if, like me, you don’t have one of these electronic cutters, then a sharp craft knife and a cutting mat will do the trick.
