Aloha, all!
As part of last Fall’s Stampin’ Up! OnStage@Home virtual conference, we were provided with some Mini Catalog stamp sets in advance of their release. One of them was Enjoy the Moment. When I first saw the stamp set, I was less than thrilled that I was going to have this stamp set in my collection. I thought of it as simply not the kind of a stamp set that I enjoy working with. I know that lots of people do – probably many of you! But it just didn’t call out to me.
About the Stamp Set
This set is a Cling Stamp Set (rubber stamp with a layer that clings to acrylic blocks) that includes 8 images and 5 sentiments, for a total of 13 rubber stamps. ALL of the images are seed pods. Seed pods! What am I going to do with seed pods?! Well, it turned out that I’ve done a lot with them. The truth of the matter is that I don’t like having a stamp set in my stash unless I use it. And use it I have.
The First Card
I have to tell you that I simply don’t remember making my first card with this stamp set. I’m thinking that it was part of the OnStage@Home event. But that just doesn’t ring a bell with me. I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought of using the group of 3 small seeds that look like coffee beans as a background layer. Nonetheless, using these dark and mostly brown colors really did seems to evoke the feeling of late fall, which is the time for Thanksgiving. With a Thanksgiving sentiment, I was quite happy to send this off as a Thanksgiving card in 2020.
So I was happy that I had used this stamp set. But I was puzzled about what I was going to do with it in the future.
And Then A Swap Came Up!
I belong to quite a few groups on Facebook where lovers of Stampin’ Up! projects share what they love, issue challenges and offer swaps. In this particular swap several of us wanted to swap cards made with this set. We were all stuck with it and we wanted ideas to make this a useful product to promote to our customers. So off I went to make not one, but two cards with the set.
Using a Traditional (for me) Layout
In studying the stamp set, I realized that several of the images were small enough that I might be able to group them into sets of 3 or 4 to create a card front. That’s something that I do a lot as I love layering different shapes and groups of shapes on a card front. And so I designed the card on the right. The seed pods on the right and left are seed pods of the Bottle Tree from Australia. Three of the images in the stamp set are based on that seed pod. The image in the middle is a Sweetgum Tree seed pod.
For the background I used one of the sheets of paper from the In Good Taste Designer Series Paper set and then a layer of Gray Granite Cardstock. I stamped the three pods using Basic Gray, Soft Suede, and Gray Granite Inks, and the sentiment (from the stamp set) in Soft Suede.
But Enough With the Browns and Grays!
The card at the top of this post is where I finally saw the real potential of this stamp set. The images, all from nature, are a great accent for any card where the sentiment is the main focus on the set. Now I can see that they are very likely a “go to” set when I just want to send a “Thinking of You” or “Just a Note” card. I looked back at the top card – I made that one first – and realized that’s just what I’d done.
Getting away from the browns and grays of the first two cards, I went to a paper set that says in its name and it’s not brown – it’s Forever Greenery. Yes, these may be seed pods, and brown is their natural color. But they can be nicely accented with greens and blues. For this arrangement in the jar from the Jar of Flowers Stamp Set I used two of the colors in the Forever Greenery set – Pretty Peacock and Soft Seafoam – as the main colors, which really accented the Soft Suede of the Poppy Seed Pod that forms the center of the card. The sentiment is from the Enjoy the Moment Stamp Set, and is one I plan to use as long as this stamp set is in a Stampin’ Up! catalog!
The Bottom Line
As I said in my title for this post, this is a very versatile stamp set. I’d encourage you to look around at other sites to see what people have done with it. And then I’ll be happy to help you buy it from my Stampin’ Up! shop. You definitely won’t regret having bought this set.
Happy Stamping!
