Stamping Platform - third card

Ok, after this week I will stop calling them first, second, third etc LOL.
I was having a look through my card box and finding that they are mostly birthdays, so I have decided to try and build up a stock of 'other' cards too.  The cards I find most difficult to make are sympathy cards, so I thought I would see what I could come up with.

The lotus is a multi-step stamp set from SU, the sentiment is from my collection, possibly Woodware?  I kept to purple, black and white, with a touch of silver on the first one - that whole frame was to cover up a little mark which mysteriously appeared on the card after I had assembled it!!  It looks quite effective and I'm not sure which one I prefer. Purple for sympathy cards always seems appropriate to me, it was the Victorian colour of mourning.
Having set up the lotus on the stamp platform, I thought I would do a batch, but getting back to birthday cards!

It's fun playing around with colours to see what works :-)  Yellow and two shades of orange for the first, then pale pink and two purples.  The sentiment is from Stamping all Day.
The mats and stamping background are all die-cut, using Rare Earth dies, which fit an A6 card perfectly.

Stamping Platform - second card

I was hanging on for the stamping platform to arrive as I knew it would be perfect for the February Beat the Christmas Rush challenge over at UK Scrappers.

I used two SU images, both of which are multi-step stamping.  After setting up the stamps on the plates for the first card, duplicating it for three more cards was a piece of cake!  Perfect for batch making.  The handwriting sentiment is from Visible Image, the other is from my sentiment box so no idea of the brand, sorry.
So that was 8 cards made in not much time at all, I also die-cut the mat and stamping background for an even more streamlined process :-)

Stamping Platform - first card

I have just got the Stamparatus, the new stamping platform from Stampin Up.  I have been thinking about getting a platform for a while and this one has two plates instead of the more usual one.
My first attempt was somewhat disastrous as I also tried some new inks, and they did not like polymer stamps!  So I went back to trying one new thing at a time LOL.

A simple monotone card, the balloons and sentiment are both SU, and there is also a matching punch so I was able to punch out masks and stamp the centre balloon.  I have had the balloons & punch for some time and not christened them so this is an OotD project too :-) The platform makes placement so easy and the greatest thing is - you know when you stamp a sentiment and it just misses one of the letters?  With this tool you can re-ink the offending letter and re-stamp in exactly the same place.  This is going to be so useful for me, the number of times I have tried to re-stamp by hand and it doesn't quite work, well I couldn't count them!
Further cards to follow during this week :-)