In the latest Close To My Heart catalog–the Seasonal Expressions 2–you’ll see the first *NEW* collection is the Little Dreamer. It’s soft, pastel colors and darling prints like unicorns, hearts and polka dots are so appealing for Spring.
It’s also the perfect collection to try some fun sponge stencil techniques with! In fact, yesterday Close To My Heart did a blog post on just this.
This first layout, they did a fun title using a Cricut cutout and sponging. You can also use our Thin Cuts dies, too!
First, use a bit of adhesive to attach your title or shape to the page. Next use a sponge dauber or the round sponge to add ink over your title or shape, and then fade the ink into your paper. Once the ink is dry, carefully remove your stencil (if there is any adhesive residue, it’s a cinch to remove with our Rub & Remove™ eraser).
For our artwork, we found it worked best to use both the round sponge and sponge daubers. We used a sponge dauber for a more concentrated look, like you can see immediately around our title, and then the round sponge for fading the ink into the page.
Sponging Tip: If you haven’t used a round sponge before, you’ll want to cut out a pie-shaped wedge from the sponge rather than using the entire sponge. That way your sponging will be more precise, and you can get more use out of your sponge!
We recommend playing with the round sponge and sponge daubers, as well as various amounts of ink, on some scratch paper before sponging onto your artwork.
They then did a favorite stencil technique to create a beautiful background; one I love the effect of, but always forget to utilize! Look at how beautiful those clouds are. And the depth that is created through a simple technique–amazing!
This stenciling technique is a great way to create unique backgrounds for your artwork. For this page, we attached three clouds to the page and sponged around them. After allowing the ink to dry, carefully removing the clouds, and removing any adhesive, we cut three more clouds and sponged around the edges. Then we popped them up with 3-D tape to give the page dimension. The final look sure is dreamy!
Their final layout creates a stunning rainbow border. It’s breathtaking.
You can incorporate multiple colors into your stenciling! Here we used a scalloped piece for our stencil, and then sponged on a rainbow of colors. There are SO many possibilities!
We hope this post has inspired you to try stenciling on your artwork. It really is such a fun way to get in touch with your inner artist!
The supplies I used for my Unicorn Card are:
- Little Dreamer Cardmaking Stamp Set + Thin Cuts dies (Z3335)
- Black Stamp Pad (Z2805)
- Thistle Stamp Pad (Z2840)
- Glacier Stamp Pad (Z2841)
- Pixie Stamp Pad (Z2844)
- Little Dreamer Paper Pack (X7219B)
- White Daisy Value Pack Cards & Envelopes (X254)
- White Daisy Cardstock (1385)
- Black & White Dots (Z3314)
- Thin 3-D Foam Tape (Z2060)
And for a listing of the products and Cricut sizes used in CTMH’s beautiful scrapbook layouts, check out their blog post.