Cards and stuff ...

Here's a cute little card twinset I did tonight. End result: not too shabby.
Teddybella by Stamping Bella and small oval and sentiment by A Muse.
The paper is by SU and the patterned paper is from the Basic Grey Phoebe 6x6 pack. I used stardust stickles on a few parts of the bella (hard to tell in the pic) and stardust gel pen on the sentiment. The ribbon is May Arts and the 3/16th eyelets are American crafts (love you cropadile!). Also, I am LOVING the mono multi liquid glue. Main reason ... I cannot layer with straight even borders ... and that totally BUGS! The mono multi is forgiving while I finesse the layers ... just don't put too much down or it'll ooze out the edges. I didn't want to believe all these bloggers who have said it's the bizzle but now I'm converted. All hail Mono Multi (in the green and white bottle).

Liz emailed me a question on what kind of black ink I use ... I thought, for those of you who might be interested, it'd make an interesting blog post. So here I go ... I'm sure that there are a lot of opinions out there about this but here's mine. SU! Basic black kind of stinks (sorry Shelli). I find it smudges a lot, especially when water coloring with the blender pen. And it takes forever to dry. I really like the black stazon (it's the #1 ink I use) because it dries really super fast (have I ever mentioned my addiction to instant gratification?) and hardly smudges at all. I have tried Palette Hybrid Noir and Burnt Umber. They really don't dry very fast - I usually end up heat setting them with my heat gun. And they do smudge some (less on w/c paper than whisper white). I have never noticed if the black inks are truly BLACK or just a hazy black, to be honest. But the Palette hybrid burnt umber is a lot lighter, warmer brown than the timber brown stazon ... think close to cocoa almost. I have also tried the versafine onyx black. This does a great job if you have a super detailed image (compared to dye ink) but it smears terribly and takes forever to dry (even though it says it "dries instantly" ... what planet are they from that forever = instantly?).

Here's a link to a thread on splitcoast that shows some of the smudging issues of different black inks and papers using prismacolor markers and copic markers.
http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=243595
I don't think she used su markers but it kind of gives you a good idea of the "smudge factor."

I prefer stazon b/c it dries so fast and never use su! basic black. My only complaints with stazon are that the stamp/image can get goo-ey if you're inking up the same image several times in a row (mass production). Plus the ink pad can dry out really quickly. I am also totally neurotic about cleaning my images when stamping with stazon ... I've heard horror stories about the mess it can leave on your stamps. But I'm generally a neurotic stamp cleaner ... or just generally neurotic.

Well, that is MY 2 cents on THAT subject. Also I wanted to give a shout out to Tracy, a nice gal who has joined one of my ATC swaps ... she just started blogging and I wanted to post a link to her blog ... Eat, Sleep, Stamp ... that's a really cute name for a blog, and so are her cards ... I'm looking forward to seeing more. Go Tracy!! And the rest of you ... check out her blog.