The next question I received in my competition is from Robyn.  Robyn asked about Stampin’ Up!’s designer brads, if they are shown in actual size in the catalogue and if the larger brads are too heavy for some projects.   Interesting you should ask that Robyn because when I bought my designer brads I was suprised to see how big they are.  Yes, they’re shown at 100% size in the catalogue but I had purchased them as a pre-order looking at a pdf file and didn’t take much notice of the size.  So I had the same concern when I picked them up… these brads are definitely solid!  Surprisingly though, they sit beautifully on a card and I would say that’s probably because their prongs are also very solid.  I used one of the brads on a card which I sent to a magazine (wont be published for a little while yet) – to do that means that I was 100% confident that it wasn’t too heavy and that it would be stable and sit perfectly on the card… photography in magazines is extremely unforgiving and the slightest issue with a card is magnified.  So here’s another card I just made using the largest of the brads, and as a challenge I put 3 of the jumbo brads on this card.  By the way, I also sat the card on my desk vertically to test it and it stood there quite fine.

So with this card I actually started with the brads rather than the stamps and I chose those flower stamps because they are identical to the brads!  Actually I trimmed the flowers down so what you can’t see is the dots around the flowers which match the dots on the brads.  The flowers are stamped in Rose Red and are from Stampin’ Up!’s Enjoy Every Moment Stamp set.  The word “happy” is from a stamp set called “Happy Everything”.  Incidentally, I can answer part of Donna’s question here… Donna, the word ‘happy’ was stamped in Whisper White ink and ask you can see it’s nice and bold.  I’d say that if your cardstock is changing colour then it’s the cardstock that’s the issue – years ago I had that issue with cardstock changing colour when I put glitter glue on it so I do know that some cardstock changes with anything ‘wet’ that you put on it.  To make the white nice and bold, the inkpad is a pigment ink so it is very wet compared to dye inks – so you just need to leave it to dry a bit or give it a shot with the heat gun to speed up the drying process.  So back to what I was talking about with the brads… you can’t tell in this photo but the flowers are actually mounted onto the card with Stampin’ Dimensionals (foam dots) so they pop up from the card and still the card takes the weight of the brads without an issue.  Thank you for your question Robyn, I hope you like my card and that you will one day enjoy using these brads.

Any questions about this card, anything else to do with stamping or if you’d just like to purchase any Stampin’ Up! products, please email me on angelasargeant@gmail.com