I absolutely love the Turnabout stamps by Concord & 9th and have a few of them in my collection. I love the concept of being able to create lovely colourful background patterns using up to 4 different colours of my choice. I have lots of small stamps in my stash and wondered if I could make up my own versions using some of them. I failed miserably and soon realised that the placement of the different elements to make up the designs was much more difficult than it looked. Then one day, while window shopping turnabout stamps I had a brain wave. Concord & 9th produce a pack of alignment guides for their stamps which worked out at around £7 for over 20. I figured I could use these guides to place my own small stamps on and thereby create my own version of a turnabout stamp. Some of the designs have all small designs while others include some larger elements so I tried a few. I am being brave and honest here as I’m showing you my first attempts. They are by no means perfect but are a start and I’ve learned a lot too. My concept did actually work really well if the execution was less than perfect. The trickiest thing was making sure not to dislodge any of the small stamps whilst cleaning in between rotations. I did have a couple that didn’t cling very well and were a pain. I know now for future reference, to make sure I only use stamps that have a good level of cling. Enough waffling here are the results of my experiments. See what you think.

Here’s a card I made using one of the backgrounds I created.