Scrapbook Saturday: Focus on Stamping

For this past week, I have been think a lot about what I am trying to do with this blog. I first started this blog back in December of 2008 as a way to share bits and pieces of my life, photos, recipes, and all of my crafty endeavors. I have truly enjoyed doing that, and have worked very hard at improving in all of those areas, so it is so much fun for me to go back and see some of my earliest posts. Lately, I have been searching for a way to refresh things here, and keep improving. I have had an idea here or there, but nothing that really stuck with me. Well, last night I was in my craft room labeling my inks (so funny that this is what I chose to do on a Friday night, I must be getting old ).

  Anyway, as I was labeling them, it struck me that I have quite a few inks that had never been even opened, much less used. And I have four binders of clear stamps, plus a fair amount of rubber stamps.

 And while I love the beautiful designs and the gorgeous colors, I haven't done very well at actually using those collections of stamps. It got me to thinking. What could I do to motivate myself to use all of those lovely stamps and inks that are collecting dust on my shelves? I make cards from time to time, but scrapbooking is my first love, so I would really prefer to find ways to use my stamps on my pages. And then I had my "lightbulb moment". I know that I can use stamps on my layouts, I just need the motivation to remember to use them, and a blog series might do just that! So, my intention is this: A scrapbook segment on my blog exploring my stamps and different ways or techniques of using them. And Saturdays seem like a good time to share it, if for no other reason than that I love the alliteration of "Scrapbook Stamping Saturdays"! So, I made a plan, and I wrote it down, and today is the first one. I have other plans for this blog as well, but for today, we will focus on the stamping.

I found this fun inspiration of making a stamp inspired kit, and, since making up kits to scrap with out of my stash is almost as much fun to me as making actual scrapbook pages, I knew I should definitely try it out to give me a jump start on this blog series. This is the stamp set that I used to inspire my kit:

I love butterflies and this stamp set took me in a rather "Valentine's" direction, as it instantly brought to mind Tim Holtz's Kraft resist, which lead me to think of browns, pinks, and creams. Here are the papers that I chose to coordinate with the stamps:

And here is the kit in its entirety:

I can't wait to play with it this week! It will make some very pretty pages, I think! And I can't wait to explore the joys of stamping on my scrapbook pages with you all. Next week, I will share what I make with this kit, and how I used the stamp set. Be sure to come back for more Saturday Scrapbook Stamping!