Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Tutorial Tuesday-Quick Tip on Sponges

I hope you enjoyed your long weekend and now it's back to the same old routine. I spent a LOT of time this weekend stamping and I got so much done. SO much to show you and I'm happy to say I have my Christmas Stamp a Stack Cards DONE! I'll show those to you later this week along with details on the class. I will say that I really love the cards I came up with for this years stamp a stack and I think you'll really like them too. They're all very easy to make, so they'll be easy to duplicate and make at the stamp a stack and later at home if you want.

But enough about those, it's time for Tutorial Tuesday! I have a quick tip I want to show you for todays tutorial. I think it's incredibly helpful and it's saved my sponging sanity. I've just recently have gotten into sponging and texturing my projects with sponges and so I've never had an organized system for sponges or sponge daubers. Until now, I had 24 sponge daubers and none of them were labled-all of them were used and so when I needed a color, I'd go to my drawer and go "Hmmm, yeah that look like Old Olive or close enough anyway" Which isn't a great system and gets your ink pads mixed up and muddied and it just wasn't working. And I knew it hadn't been working for a while but it wasn't until I took a sponge dauber out of the drawer-a white one--A CLEAN BRAND NEW ONE---so I dipped it into my Elegant Eggplant ink pad, only to realize it wasn't a brand new it was last used on my white craft pad---AHHH, now I had a white circle in the center of my elegant eggplant ink pad. So after a little cleaning and daubing with a wet paper towel, it's fine now but that's when I decided that I needed a better system for my sponges. So last week if you remember from this post, I had bought 3 bags our our sponges and here's what I did with them.
I cut each sponge into 8 pieces then I used a black sharpie and labeled each sponge with our colors. All 48 classic, all 6 incolors and all the neutrals. And I think I still have 2 whole sponges left. I decided to use the sponges as opposed the sponge daubers for 2 reasons. 1) it was a whole lot cheaper. 2) I like the look and even-ness the sponges provide on projects opposed to the daubers. So my sponging solution is fixed.
These are the in colors. It may be a little hard to read my jumbled language there, but I can read them and it all makes sense to me. Oh and more thing I did, I wrote the name on one side, on the other I did BB for bold brights, EE for earth elements, etc. AND they're all in different bags based on color group so I'll be able to find the right color quickly.

So that's it for today. I know I haven't shown anything in a couple of days but make sure to check back tomorrow, I have a great project to show you!
Thanks for looking, see you tomorrow!

2 comments:

Mary said...

Great! I'm always wondering if i washed my sponge before I put it away. I think I'll try your technique. i just happened to buy some sharpies the other day, so I'm half way there!

I have labeled some of my sponge daubers. I just write the name on a little piece of cs and tape it around the finger plastic part. MTM

Linda Tarolli said...

Great idea to keep them bagged by color group! I've marked them before but they've never been organized.