Take care of your Pastels when you use your blender pens.  Only wipe the edges of your pastel color blocks with the blender pens.  After time a semi-hard surface will cover your pastels and you won’t be able to get any color on your sponges or daubers.  If you do get this coating on your pastels, wipe it off softly with your finger nail or a nail file.  Be gentle so you don’t break your pastels or take away too much color.  Did you also know that you can order a ‘family’ of pastels?  If you use up all of your Earth Elements pastels,  go to page 200 in your Idea Book & Catalog to see the pastels and then call me with your order.  Now get those pastels out and have fun blending and stamping!

We love our stampin’ scrubs, but what side do we use to spray our stampin’ mist?  If you have ever wondered how to keep track of the clean side?  Here’s my tip for the day.  Take a bleach pen and write a big “W”, for wet, on the side that you use to spray your stampin’ mist.  Let the bleach sit for about an hour and clean it off in the sink.  Use just a little dish soap to clean your stampin’ scrub, under warm water.  This is also the way to clean your stampin’ scrub on a regular basis.  If you notice that your stamps are getting clean enough, try cleaning your stampin’ scrub with dish soap and warm water.  Rinse thoroughly and let air dry.  Now you have a clean scrub and you know what side to put the cleaner on!  Also, the “W” can be an “M” for moist, for those sitting across from you looking at the scrub upside down!

Look very carefully and you can see the W on the right side, honestly it’s there.

Here’s a tip sent to me by Leane Martin…

And here’s a tip I learned from a scrapbooking show… If you have stickers that you want to pop-up with dots…  We don’t want the stickers to stick to the page, we want them to pop.  So you pull the sticker from the sticker sheet, adhere the pop-up dots to the back of the sticker as needed.  But don’t remove the protective paper from the back of the dots yet, where they will adhere to the page.  Use a paintbrush to brush baby powder on the remaining sticky-part of the sticker.  This will cancel out the stickiness, so that the non-popped areas won’t stick to your page.  Then remove the protective paper from the dots and adhere to your page.  I used this on 2 of the sticker embellishments on this page.