 Hey stampers! Welcome to another week of Watch It Weekly Wednesday. I am Beth, part of the stamping gel creative team, and I wanted to show you a technique that kind of emerged as I was playing with a stamp set. I got this cute stamp set, Pirates and Mermaids, at the request of some of our customers because they were looking for some cards to use for their little tween, grandkids, or children, and kind of like younger demographic that they were looking to make some cards for. And so we purchased the stamp set with them in mind and wanted to come up with some cards for them. This is a great stamp set. It's got some cute little sayings for birthdays or for other little things that you can celebrate with a younger child. So as I started stamping with this stamp set, I realized I would have to have a coloring technique to use because these are a line art stamp set. You've got to fill in with color, which we have great options for that. We've got pastels, and we have stamp and blends, and we have markers. We have so many great things you can use. But I know that not everybody has all of those products on hand. And so as I started stamping, I wanted to come up with a way that I could add color without using one of those traditional product tools. So let me show you what I decided to do. I'll show you this simple project first. I took and put my little mermaid on a three by three inch card. We have these envelopes that we sell that are three by three, which I thought was kind of perfect for just a young child. It's just a cute little size card that you could write a little note for them. Now, if you notice what I've done here is I've stamped directly on designer series paper. This is the sweet symmetry designer series paper that I've used here. I took my mermaid image and I stamped her on different colors of paper. And then I cut that paper out and I pieced it right on top of my stamped image. And that gave me some color without having to have a marker or a blend to use. I did still use my petal pink light and dark blend to color her skin tone. So that these are very useful to have if you're using a line art stamp set. But that's kind of the technique I'm going to be showing you today. So let me show you how I did this technique from start to finish so you can kind of get the idea. It looks a little crazy. So bear with me. Stay with me. I'm going to be using my mermaid and then I'm going to use memento black for my ink pad because if you do end up coloring with blends, this is the stamp head you want to use so that it doesn't bleed. You can use other stamp heads, but you might get a little bit of bleeding. I'm going to use the pansy petals designer series paper for this particular mermaid. These are the little pieces I'm going to be using. So if you've got a lot of designer series paper, the great thing about our designer series paper is that they have coordinating packs and they're double-sided. So as you're planning your project, you may have all of the colors that you need just in one pack of designer series paper and you can use just little snippets of each of the pieces. Let me show you what I mean. So for my mermaid, I'm going to start with her tail. I'm going to use this little flowery piece here and I'm just going to ink up my stamp in the memento and you don't have to stamp the entire image because I just need her tail. I'm going to stamp it down here and get part of the image and then I'll end up cutting out her tail. Next for this one is her body. I'm going to use this cute little gingham piece for her body. So I'm going to ink my stamp up again in the memento and put it right on there. Just like that. I don't need my entire image, just the part that I'm going to be piecing for that. Next, let me do her hair. I chose kind of this red polka dotted piece. She's a mermaid, so we can go a little crazy with it. And I'm going to just make sure I get her hair on there. Stamp that down just like that. And then I'm going to do her flower in her hair in this purple gingham. So I just need to make sure I get her flower and then in this particular pack, they didn't have a solid green piece, but I wanted to do the little leaves around her flower green. So I thought, well, I could use a blend, but I didn't want to add that in if I didn't have to. So I found this piece with little leaves on it and I'm just going to make sure that my stamp ends up in that green piece so that all those leaves I can trim out and they'll be green. Okay. I know this is really fiddly, but stay with me. So what I would do and I would suggest is to get some really good paper snips. Stampin' Up has these little scissors. They're really sharp and they're really easy to maneuver. If you don't already have a pair of these, this is a really good investment. And what you'll do is just cut out your paper right along the line. You want to leave a bit of that black edge because you're going to be piecing it right on top of the stamped image. So you'll just trim, trim, trim. Now when you get to the piece right here, like there's the little flower, I'm actually going to not cut out that flower in this color. I'm going to trim around it because I only want her hair. So you have to kind of think as you're cutting out and it's going to look a little wonky and then we're going to put it together like a puzzle. Okay. So you'll just cut all out around that just like that and you'll do that with all your pieces. And here is what you'll end up with. Here's my cute little mermaid and all of the little different pieces there. And I just added it to a cute little gift bag. This is one of the sayings in the stamps that you're a treasure and it's got these cute little treasure boxes on there too. I stamped those in the same designer series paper as I did her hair and I cut those out and added them too. So that's one project. Let me bring this one back in and show you this one I made before. This one I used the sweet symmetry designer series paper. Cute very traditional and I did use my blends for this one. I used my light and dark petal pink blends to color her skin tone. This little guy this cute little pirate. I use this simply elegant designer series paper for his clothes here and then I added some yellow paper here from the sweet symmetry and the background here is the textures paper. So I just kind of pieced him together. I thought that was really fun. Another little three by three card. Here I did a tag for it's your birthday. This designer series paper that I use is the expressions in ink paper. But she looks pretty similar to the one I did before. So I wonder as you make these if you'll find a bunch of different ways to use designer series paper and I noticed as I cut them out they looked really different because they're such small pieces of paper. It was fun to kind of play around with them and see what they ended up with. This one I thought was really cute. I did a little door hanger. Just die cut out a circle at the top of this paper and put Ahoy there matey and then built my little pirate and for this designer series paper pack I used the in color six by six paper pack and built my little pirate there. So fun. This technique can be used in so many different ways with different designer series paper and many different line art stamp sets. I think that as the holidays approach you'll be able to create some really fun things with the Christmas designer series paper that we're offering. It'll be really fun. If you do create some things we would love to see them. Share them with us on our Facebook page at Stamping Jill or if you can share them here on YouTube and just in the comments we would love love love to see your creations. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next week for another Watch The Week Wednesday.