stampin' pastels techniques again!

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know that I'm on a mission to eradicate pastel-o-phobia in the stamping community. Seriously! I'm not sure why, but so many demonstrators are so afraid of their stampin' pastels they never even take them out of the plastic wrapping. Shocking, I know, and yet I've seen it with my own eyes. It's almost as if those little squares of chalk were permeated with a deadly virus or something. LOL!

Well I love pastels, and so last spring I offered a stampin' pastels techniques class to the demonstrators in the Stampers in Stitches. And a really surprisingly large number of them took me up on my offer. In fact, we had to have three different sessions to accommodate everyone. WOW!

But that was last spring, and now we have a number of new demos in our group and I've been requested to do the class again. Great! . . except that all of the cards I designed for the last class used sets that have since retired. So now I need to come up with a new design for each technique. As you can imagine, in the next few days it may be all pastels, all the time, as I experiment with different designs. And here are the first two.

This first card uses the Stamping Pastels technique (what I like to call direct to stamp pastels) with my own little twist that I don't think I've seen before. I'm not going to spill the beans just yet, because I don't want to spoil the surprise for my students, but I rather like the very soft effect created with this technique.

The second card uses the Pullin' (ETA: in the original post I said poppin' instead of pullin'. Sometimes I'm such a dork!) pastels technique, which is very difficult to photograph because the photo does not really show the velvety texture that you see in person. But in real life this technique is a total wow for me every time -- I never get tired of it! And its sheer simplicity makes it a perfect technique for beginner stampers too!

Anyway, I hope you like pastels. You will be seeing more over the next few days. Enjoy!