Joanna.com: October 2013

If you are crafty, like me (no, not wily, crafty…) you know that craft obsessions come and go. I’ve had my beaded flowers period, my cross stitch period, and I’m still convinced that I’m going to make a basket out of buttons one of these years.

Not made by me - but I have the buttons and the instructions!

But my enduring obsession has been rubber stamps, and making greeting cards.

The world of rubber stamping has changed so much in the short amount of time I’ve been playing along. Finding the right stamps that fit my tastes was and is a challenge, but as mail order catalogues have given way to internet shopping, that challenge has shifted, but not disappeared. More on that in another post.

One of the biggest changes to this very small world is due to the rise of the scrapbooking movement – taking all of your photos and mounting them artfully with text and/or other ephemera and souvenirs. The scrapbooking craze made papercraft materials more varied, plentiful, and widely available than ever. Machines and papers that were only in stationers and copy shops were suddenly on the shelves at big box craft stores and smaller specialty stores around the country. I was mostly oblivious to this as it was happening.

In my rubber stamping haze, I was slow to focus on paper. I’ve almost always started with a white card stock base, layering images, color, other paper elements, but always with a rubber stamp focus.

Birthday card - 2006

Then there was my amazing discovery of duplex paper – cardstock that was colored on one side and white on the other – it is still a must have in my craft room. But now, it’s not color that’s got me hooked, it’s texture.

At some point along the road I realized that crafters had these manual machines that do magical things and allow you to crank out die-cut images, but also add texture to your paper. It’s simple, it’s amazing, and I can’t get enough of it. It’s not even electronic! I now look for embossing folders everywhere I go. Like the quest for the perfect rubber stamps in my earlier crafting years, now I make lists of companies and the designs they have and wonder why I can’t ever find them locally or easily.

The conundrum for me is making the texture fit in with my stamping style, which remains mostly two-dimensional. What I commonly see in online photo galleries are cards that feature textured panels with little to no stamped images or sentiments, or cards that use textured papers as backgrounds where the embossed image is largely obscured. I’m looking for ideas somewhere in the middle.