As I’ve mentioned before, I do love a good book. I have however noticed recently that I appear to have been collecting them a lot, but not reading them at a pace to match.

Having recently cancelled my TV subscription I decided that it would be a good time to start catching up on those unread works.

This thought of reading always gives me an idea to make a bookmark. On looking through my photographic archives recently I discovered some photos of a book mark that I made using stamps and inks so I thought that I would share this little make with you today.

It all started with a rose stamp.

The rose stamp itself was a free one from a copy of Craft Stamper magazine. I’ve got quite a collection of these magazines now and really should get around to using these stamps – (oh dear, more unused purchases – there appears to be a trend forming here!)

Well, at least this project was one simple attempt to have a go at breaking that stash down.

I had a little play at various different layouts and styles. After my experiments I had a few different styles available. Here are the sheets all together. (It was watercolour cardstock by the way).

For the first attempt I stamped the roses quite uniformly.

Then masked of each of the larger roses …

… and then stamped into the blank areas.

After removing the masks it looked like this.

Quite “busy” but I liked it none the less. I actually thought that it might make a nice wrapping paper for mother’s day next year.

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For the second attempt I stamped a little more randomly and used lighter and darker inks in-between the larger roses.

I then used a water brush to draw out some of the ink in the larger roses.

I liked how the larger roses looked like they were floating.

Happy with this design I cut a strip down and inked the edges.

I also overstamped the large roses with black ink to highlight them. I wasn’t particularly careful with this step as I was looking for a sort of lino print effect.

I think that it worked out well.

I then masked off the large roses again.

Finally I used the black ink again and stamped into the blank areas.

I didn’t actually like the finished result after this stage – I thought that there were too much black and that the main roses didn’t stand out anymore – so went back and cut a new strip of the previous roses design.

This time I just mounted it onto a simple black and white combo of cardstock and then coated it with a laminating strip. I say laminating strip, it was really clear packing tape – a cheaper and equally nice alternative.

This is how it ended up.

I quite like it, don’t you?

As you can see I am working my way through a new Stephen King novel. There are more to go after this – I’ve got a backlog of Dean Koontz, a couple of James Herberts, some from Robert Ranking and a couple of totally random ones like, “Apocolypse Cow” which is about zombie cows running amok. I know, sounds weird, right?! Lol.

Anyway, have you got a good book going on at the moment?

In terms of the rest of the papers, I haven’t actually decided what I am going to do with them yet (even though I made them some time back) – yes, yet another work-in-progress, lol! Ah well, it’s always good to have a bank of ideas rather than none at all.

As ever, if you have any comments or questions relating to the content of this post then please feel free to get in touch via the comments section below.

Thanks for stopping by. See you next time.

J :)