Getting More Out of Your Stamps

I'll start at the beginning. I was web surfing one day and found this very cool piece of artwork. I found it here. It's one of my favorite websites for inspiration. I thought it was very funky and I knew I'd use it to inspire a layout someday. Fast forward a couple of weeks to when I got the Cotillion kit. I pulled out the girl and boy silhouette stamp and knew exactly what I was going to do!

The only problem I had was I wanted the girl heads to go one way, and when I stamped them on the back of the paper I wanted to use as the silhouette, they faced the opposite direction. So the idea came to me to try using the B side or the back of the stamp. I flipped the stamp over, inked it, stamped it, cut it out, and voila, I had the image I wanted! The B side is a bit bigger you'll notice, and the detail is much less. But for my purposes of recreating the artwork, I thought it was perfect. With much less detail to worry about, it was a cinch to cut the images out and flip them over.
My Besties layout is the result, all those images have been stamped on the opposite side, cut out, flipped and attached to my page. Easy.


That project got me to thinking about what would happen if I used the B side of other stamps. I know Sassafras had some stamps specifically made to get this effect, and I think Technique Tuesday did as well, but I thought it might work with some of my Studio Calico stamps too. The following images are what happened. Not all stamps will work, and some of them require turning upside down when you stamp the A side onto the B side image, like below. But the effect is really pretty neat. The following stamps in the shop work with this technique:

Know This

Story Time frame

Map (not available)

TypeSet Alpha

I didn't try all of them out, but I do think the following would also work: Houndstooth, This Moment (the title and the circles stamp), Buttons, Botanicals (the turnip), Spirograph, and Hot Air Balloon.