Things We Love!

Hello Craft Lovers!

How is everyone doing?! We hope the answer is great! We're doing pretty great ourselves. Summer has been such a busy time for all of the Chicks that we've barely spent anytime on our computers or even in our craft rooms! *Gasp!* We have been creating a little here or a little there so if you're feeling the withdrawal from our blog or our YouTube channel, make sure to subscribe to our Instagram page. We keep that updated much more often! We do have some pretty fun things planned, so we're hoping to be doing more tutorials and blog posts in the coming months. 

One of the fun things, is this new segment we call "Things We Love." Here we'll showcase our favorite crafting tools, papers we swoon for and all the other things that made us open our wallets so we could take them home! We hope these posts will inspire you to get crafting!

Not too long ago, Hannah and I (Joyce) we're out killing some time at our local craft stores with my nephew, Jayden. He's only two and a half but he's a crafting deal spotter already! While we were at Michael's, Hannah spotted these great little ink pads by ColorBox Mix'd Media Inx on clearance for less than $2 each! We just had to have them!

I took home the (in order from left to right) Pewter, Patina, and School House. I just love them! I wish I would have taken home one in every color because they are such nice inks! The pads are nicely saturated and the colors are very vivid! (I'll show a stamp off sampling in just a moment.) Another thing I love about these stamps is that they are easily stackable which is awesome for saving space and keeping my favorite inks together!

The next place we went to was Hobby Lobby and we just love their clearance section! I think I can safely say that all three of the Chicks much prefer the cling stamps to the rubber block mounted stamps. The cling stamps are easier to clean, stay crisp longer and store away with much less space taken. But they are not really something you find in the clearance section too often. So in these instances, I love rubber block mounted stamps! I found these little gems on our last trip there:

The sentiments read (again, from left to right): Good friends don't spill the beans, a sail boat picture, The heart that loves is always young - Greek Proverb. I think they are all adorable  Where I might not have taken the plunge for the original $8 and up stickers, I'm more than happy to take them home at the very discounted prices. 

So with these new ink pads and these new stamps I did a little stamp off test for everyone to see why I LOVE the new inks! For those who may not recognize the term "Stamp Off" it refers to the action of saturating a stamp with ink one time, then making multiple stampings before re-saturating the stamp again with more ink.

You can see that inks held up really well the second time and even the third time with the School House red and the Patina blue colors! The Pewter grey color did very well, and I think if the stamp had not had such a flat surface for LOVES that it might have looked just as crisp. Also, a darker color paper would probably have done more justice to the Pewter, but I was still very happy with the result. 

I did make a card using the Patina blue color ink. My nephew wanted to send a card to a family friend of ours who gave him a bunch of hand-me-down clothes that he loved. (He didn't know he wanted to send a card, but we knew he did.) Even on bright green paper, the blue still was the focus and I just love the results! What do you think?

The glittery strip was a scrap from some previous card albums I had made. It just adds a little something! I love the sentiment and the tiny turtle, I think both make it a great card from a kid. 

So that's it for this edition of Things We Love, we hope you enjoyed it! Keep on the lookout for more installments of this segment! Also, for the month of August we'll be making cards and other things using our scraps! We know you've got them and we're going to show you how to use them! Look for the headline post: From the Scrap Pile to High Style!

Take care and enjoy your summer!

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Marisol & Joyce