Hi bloggers! Happy STAMPtember® Wednesday afternoon to you! I’m so pleased to bring you another beautiful exclusive feature from the amazing Lisa Spangler! She’s sharing a couple beauties she made with a stamp she designed herself! How cool is that? Enjoy!

Hi there! It’s Lisa Spangler here and I’m so excited to join in the STAMPtemper celebration! Today I’m going to share two ways to use new Lisa’s Painted Maple Leaf stamp from Hero Arts. First a little back story. I drew the maple leaf while I was vacationing in Quebec, never dreaming that it would be made into a stamp one day. I used a pencil to make a sketch from a real leaf, then watercolored it. I can’t get over how the stamp captures the details from my drawing! And I am so excited to have my own line of boutique stamps with Hero Arts. It all feels like a dream! So unreal stamping it.

I drew the leaf in summer when the leaf was a nice bright green. But since it’s fall, the first thing I did when I got my stamp was to make it look like autumn! So, I broke out some Distress inks and markers and went to town: first I covered the whole stamp with spiced marmalade, then I tapped on some festive berries here and there. I used tea dye and walnut stain markers on the stem. Then I gave it a light misting with water and stamped it on white cardstock.

My Dad’s birthday is coming up fast, so I stamped the happy birthday message with Art Print brown ink, then added some splatters with Mister Huey’s.

Here’s a little tip if you haven’t used splatters before — try making the dark splatters first, then stamp your message and leaf later.

To finish of the card, I added some Hero Arts orange metallic decor. Love this metallic decor, it’s kind of like enamel dots — only well, metallic! :-D

For the second card, I used the same leaf and put it in the same spot on the card, but I stamped it at a different angle and switched up the message and the background. I just can’t get enough of the chalkboard trend these days, and the Hero Arts Chalk Background stamp stays out on my desk at all times! So I grabbed it and stamped a background on black layering paper with white dye ink. Then I stamped the maple leaf in Unicorn — love how it shows up on the black and looks like chalk! Or maybe a fossil!

After everything was dry I rubbed the area of the cardstock where I was going to emboss the message, then stamped it in Unicorn and heat embossed it with white powder.

Then I added some metallic decor in red, orange and black! Love how the black goes with the chalkboard look! And just can’t wait to give this to my Dad — glad he doesn’t read the Simon Says Stamp blog! ;-)

Thanks so much for joining me today, and happy Stamptember! xo