More Halloween - Customer ATCs!!

These two ATCs are by RINA!

Aren't these awesome?!?

The one on the top is made with our Halloween cat, and our jackolantern.

And the one on the bottom is made with our Spider lady poster and our black cat.

Cool spooky cards!!!

Thanks Rina!!

Check out her blog for more GREAT cards and crafts!!

Happy Halloween!!!

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Customer Art - Spooky Halloween ATC's!

Both of these Creepy Halloween ATC's are by Kristin Hubick

Check out her super cool blog! And she has a really neat store too:

http://www.retrocafeart.com/

"Boo", on the top, was made with our Calavera with Heart stamp. Kristin says..."Using Modge Podge I secured scrapbooking paper to a playing card. After stamping the background, and stenciling several layers of paint, I attached vintage images. I stamped the skulls onto regular paper, cut them out, and colored the hearts with prismacolor colored pencils. I inked the edges of the card and sealed with Modge Podge. Finally I attached vintage game pieces with E6000 to spell the word "boo"."

"Halloween Party", on the bottom, was made with our Calavera with Heart and Pinstriped Black Widow stamps. "Using Modge Podge I secured scrapbooking paper to a playing card. After stamping the background, I attached several vintage images. I stamped the skull onto regular paper, cut him out, and colored the heart with prismacolor colored pencils. I inked the edges of the card and sealed with Modge Podge."

Happy Halloween!!! And thanks for sending us your beautiful art Kristin!

See more customer cards, crafts and creepy rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com

Vampira and Dracula Coffin and Recipe Boxes

Hey check these out!

They are fabo cool boxes made by our friends

ChristopherAndTia, with a couple of our stamps, Vampira and Dracula. Just in time for Halloween!!

The Dracula is a recipe box, including cards, hand painted, hand stamped AND for sale at ChristopherAndTia's etsy store!

And this Vampira coffin jewelry box is also for sale at their etsy store! They have a lot of other fun and fabulous hand made goodies at their store too! And they have a super cool blog!

Go check it out!

Happy October!

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

BY THE WAY****
Did you know that our new line of rubber stamps is now available? We have NEW stuff like this...

And stuff like... a Pinata, nautical star, lochness monster, gravestones, airstream trailer, skull and crossbones with hearts and more!!!
Go check them out! http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Pirate Day - Customer cards and crafts

Hey, hope you all had a great weekend...

In honor of the upcoming holiday ~ Talk like a Pirate Day ~ here are a few fun pirate themed cards and crafts for your amusement.

This first customer craft is by Eileen ~ She made a pendant with a domino and used our Pirate Skull and Crossbones rubber stamp. What an awesome and creative use of an old domino!

The next customer craft is by Rina ~ She used our Pirate and Parrot rubber stamp, and made this atc with other stamps by Just Johanna. A beautiful Black and White card!

This next card was done by me ~ I used our Pirate and Parrot, Pirate Skull and Crossbones and Swashbuckler Pirate Rubber Stamps. I drew the map myself with markers, cut the eyepatch out of black card stock, and embossed the stamp on with white embossing powder. The edges were ripped and sponged with brown dye ink, and the saying was done with computer.

This last fun craft was made with our Skull and Crossbones rubber stamp. ~ My sister and I made this eyepatch with black canvas and black elastic. We stamped the pirate with white pigment ink. Be sure to dry it or give it time to dry...

And here's her husband wearing the patch. (Actually it's just his head and a different body... heh heh :) )

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day everyone!

ARRRGGGHHH!!!

Send us your cards and crafts so we can post your stuff too!!
And see more customer cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Summer Card Contest Winners!!

Hey~ Sorry it took us so long to post the summer card contest winners, we've been trying all day, but alas, we've been victim to constant satellite outages...

However, here are the results!

First of all, we want to thank everyone who participated in our first contest! It was so much fun seeing what everyone came up with and receiving all those awesome cards. We're going to post all of the participant's cards eventually, because they were just too beautiful.

It was really hard to pick the winners, and we honestly couldn't choose one over the other, so to make things fair and impartial, we had our baby Dahlia help us! She drew 3 names from a "hat" (our leopard print fez).

First she shook the fez...

Then she picked the first place winner...

We'll announce them backwards. Drumroll please....
The third place winner is...

Emi Matsuoka!!! Congratulations! You win our Lil' Grab bag of 10 unmounted rubber stamps!
Here's Emi's fabulous card.


And in second place we have...

Rina Koibuchi!!! Congratulations! You win our Medium Grab bag of 15 unmounted rubber stamps!

Here's Rina's beautiful card.

And our first place winner is....

Eileen Bellomo!!!
Congratulations! You win our Macho Grab bag of 30 unmounted stamps! Yay!!
Here's her fabulous card.

"I looked through my stash of Sideshow stamps and found a few that are just perfect to commemorate summer. Also, my recent wonderful trip to Curacao didn't hurt. I saw plenty of palms, boats, parrots, but, I confess, no mermaids. However, this is what I came up with...The images are colored with watercolor pencils, crayons and chalk. I also used a lot of Glimmer Mist, though the golden shine doesn't come out so well in the scan." ~ Eileen

And then Dahlia ate the winner's names...

Have a great week everyone!
:)


See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com

Coffee Shop Googie Sign -Card

Happy Labor Day Weekend! Hope you all had a fun time with your families and friends.

I've been reading this great book from 1982 called "Blue Highway" by William Least Heat Moon. It's about his travels in 1978 when he drove the back roads and "blue highways" in order to search out and see the towns untouched by interstate highways, fast food chains and mini malls. Reading about his visits with eccentric characters in greasy spoon type diners and "4 calendar" cafes reminded me of this card I made a while back.

It is made with all of our googie coffee shop signs, and colored with blender pens, metallic gel pens, and sponged with dye ink.

For those of you unfamiliar with "googie" wikipedia describes it well:

"Googie, also known as populuxe or doo-wop, is a subdivision of futuristic architecture, influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age, originating from Southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s. The types of buildings that were most frequently designed in a Googie style were motels, coffee houses and bowling alleys.
Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by space-age designs that depict motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and the ubiquitous artist's-palette motif. These stylistic conventions reflected American society's emphasis on futuristic designs and fascination with Space Age themes. The style is related to and sometimes synonymous with the Raygun Gothic style as coined by writer William Gibson. As with the art deco style of the 1930s, Googie became undervalued as time passed, and many buildings built in this style have been destroyed."

Sad....

We love "googie" here at Sideshow Stamps. The diners that serve that great homecooked food; the coffee shops where you can sit for hours and talk to complete strangers over a plate of home made pie; the motels that are clean and quaint but you're still a little afraid to touch the quilt on the bed; the offices, car washes, bowling alleys, and other such buildings that just had so much life and motion and character to their structure and design. Not to get into a big architecture rant, but have you seen the monotonous lifeless blocks they build these days? Boring...

On another note: Thank you to everyone who entered our summer card contest! We received some beautiful entries!!! We'll announce and post the winners on the 6th!

AND!!! Our new line of rubber stamps are here!!! A panda, bunny, sparrow, nautical star, ghost, gravestones, airstream type trailer and car, retro rocket and MORE!

Go check them out at www.sideshowstamps.com!!!

Have a great week all...

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Retro Beatnik Cat -Customer Card by Rina!!

How cool is this card?!?!

Rina of ciaocarina created this fantastic craft using our beatnik cat and happy birthday rubber stamps. I'm not sure where the background is from, but it is fabulously punk rock. The happy birthday cake has bright sparkles that don't show up as well on blogger, and the stamps are embossed.


Isn't her color scheme awesome?
Thanks for sending us this card Rina!!

Check out her blog too!

Happy stamping...


Hey!! Don't forget to enter your card in our summer themed contest! Prizes galore!!! Just for sending us a card stamped with Sideshow Stamps rubber stamps. More details below...

Vintage Circus Carnival Art Card

Vintage Circus Carnival Art Card

We just watched Tod Browning's
"Freaks" again...
and inspired by the side show madness I felt like posting this old art card I made a while back.


The stamps on this card are Spider Lady Circus Poster - J110I, Circus Poster - J111I, Toy Clown Head - N293E, Pinhead - N346D, KooKoo the Bird Girl - J307H, Alligator Boy - N114D, Pop Corn - N128C, Hypnotic Swirl - N34E, Pointing Hand - N398D, Vintage 1930's Circus - J375O, Desert Mesa - N270I, and Surfer Rosa - J249G.

What I did was fold a piece of beige card stock in half. Then I stamped the swirl, circus posters, desert mesa, surfer rosa and alligator boy directly on the card stock with art print brown dye ink. I stamped the pointing hand, pinhead, popcorn, bird girl, clown head, and circus on the same color of card stock with art print brown dye ink. I cut around these images and brushed the edges with art print brown dye ink. Then I colored the images with blue and yellow markers (the yellow is not as bright in real life). I taped these to blue card stock and cut around the edges. I sponged a bit more of the art print brown ink around the edges and on the main card itself. Then I taped on the circus scene with mounting tape to make it raised a bit. I taped all of the rest of the images on with double stick tape. I was going for an antique, vintage feel when I made this card, thus all the brown and monochromatic colors. Good times...

Be inspired by your favorite movie and make a piece of art to remember! It's fun!

On another note: You should go check out my husband's awesome ongoing comic saga Untamed Highway - for more Side Show, Secret Society, Tiki, Carnival, Beatnik, Horror B-Movie, Ratfinky Kustom Kulture, Creepy, madness!!

It's an amazing story you won't forget!!

And see more cards, crafts and creepy carnival cool rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

* Re-Post * Summer Contest!!

There's still time to enter our summer contest!
Here's the details...

Our first contest will be Summer themed. We're looking for cards, scrapbook pages, crafts, basically anything you can stamp on, with a theme of summer...luaus, barbeques, family picnics, road trips, pool parties, and anything else you can imagine that conjures up a fun escape from the heat.

RULES:
~ The craft must feature at least one or more of our stamps.
~ All submissions must be emailed to us by August 31st for a September 6th posting.
~ Email submissions to questions@sideshowstamps.com

PRIZES:
~ There will be a first, second and third place winner and each of these submissions will be posted on our blog on September 6th.
~ First Place-Macho Grab bag of 30 unmounted rubber stamps with a retail value of $85-$90.
~ Second Place-Medium Grab bag of 15 unmounted stamps with a retail value of $45-$50.
~ Third Place-Little Grab bag of 10 unmounted stamps with a retail value of $35-$40.

We have tons of summer themed rubber stamps such as our barbeque grill and utensils; tikis, palm trees, bathing beauties and hula girls; suns and clouds; hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream cones; circus scenes, posters and concessions; surfers; flowers; cars, trailers and roadside googie signs and lots more to give you inspiration. Plus, right now we're offering a little Summer themed grab bag to help you get started on your Summertime crafting adventures. These can be purchased on our home page at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Happy Stamping!

Retro Owl Card, Pendants, and Tip for today!

Retro Pop Art Owl ~ Birthday Card

The stamps on this card are "Pop Art 70's Owl Mate - J452H", "Retro Leaf - J297B" and "Retro Tiki Design - J299C"

What I did was cut a piece of beige card stock to size. Then I picked out a piece of ribbon (Michael's bargain bin) and chose my color scheme based on it. I then stamped the striped and diamond shaped images directly onto the card stock, with olive and blue dye ink. (Theses "stamps" are from scraps of rubber that I saved, and mounted onto a wood mount to make bold retro backgrounds.) I then stamped the leaf on the top and the tiki design on the bottom with art print brown dye ink. I laid the ribbon across the center and taped it on. Then I stamped the owl with art print brown dye ink on a piece of orange card stock, and then cut around it in a rounded shape. I sponged the edges and then taped it to a square of brown. I cut around that in an off kilter rounded edge, and then sponged those edges. The I taped it on the card. On the inside I wrote, "Happy Birthday! Hope it's a HOOT!"


TIP: Save your scraps of rubber, when you buy unmounted stamps! You can cut these into whatever shape you wish, and create your own background stamps!

Customer Craft!!!!

These fabulous pendants are by Eileen Bellomo

She used our retro owl border rubber stamp.

"I acquired some domino-like game pieces at a craft fair and finally got aound to doing something with them. I stamped them with Stazon, added embossing powder, heat set them, and used alcohol inks to color the owls. I glued on a bale, and instant pendant!"

Check out her blog for more cool crafts!

http://artsaveslives-paperqueen.blogspot.com

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com

CUSTOMER CARD!! yay!!

This here card is the first of our Customer Card posts...

This card is by Ami ~ She used our Retro Cowgirl Rubber Stamp. Great coloring job and color scheme huh?!

Thanks for your contribution Ami! Check out her blog too!

If you would like to be a part of this, email us a card you've made with some of our stamps and we'll post yours!

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com

busy busy busy...

Wow! It's been a while since we posted, and we had such great intentions of doing this at least once a week...

Well, first of all we here at Sideshow Stamps have been extremely busy with this lil' cutie!

This is our 4 1/2 month old daughter Dahlia. She's so awesome! And so much fun!!! I just did a little photo shoot with her, so I had to post a pic...

And, we've also just been blessed with two new nieces! Fun times!!

Okay, enough mommy and aunt stuff...

Here's a simple card I made recently.

It's stamped with our big wooden tiki, bamboo branches and hibiscus rubber stamps. I just stamped the bamboo directly onto the card with Memories art print brown dye ink and the hibiscus with Color Box ~ Prussian Blue chalk ink. I stamped the tiki with the same brown ink on another piece of cardstock and sponged the edges with the blue. I cut a few background layers and double stick taped it all together. Voila!

Don't forget our contest is still going and the deadline for submissions is August 31st!
Check below for details...

Card and Tip for today!

Manly Retro Coffee Shop Card

The stamps on this card are our Coffee Shop - 475G, Retro Antennae Design - N68B, and Retro Star - N71C. What I did first was cut a piece of white card stock square. I stamped the retro designs on the background with black and green dye ink. Then on another sheet of yellow card stock, I stamped the coffee shop with black dye ink. I cut the edges of this with a dull cutter blade and then taped this to a piece of green card stock, which I also cut with a dull blade. I taped the ribbon to the card and then taped the coffee shop on top of that.

TIP:

If your double stick tape doesn't want to hold the ribbon, you can always melt it with a standard hair straightener. Just hold the heated up iron on your card for about 10 seconds, or less if it's super hot. It will melt your ribbon on to your card, straight! Just be sure to designate a hair straightener for crafts as you probably don't want melted tape in your hair! :)

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com

Summer Contest

Our first contest will be Summer themed. We're looking for cards, scrapbook pages, crafts, basically anything you can stamp on, with a theme of summer...luaus, barbeques, family picnics, road trips, pool parties, and anything else you can imagine that conjures up a fun escape from the heat.
RULES:
~ The craft must feature at least one or more of our stamps.
~ All submissions must be emailed to us by August 31st for a September 6th posting.
~ Email submissions to questions@sideshowstamps.com

PRIZES:
~ There will be a first, second and third place winner and each of these submissions will be posted on our blog on September 6th.
~ First Place-Macho Grab bag of 30 unmounted rubber stamps with a retail value of $85-$90.
~ Second Place-Medium Grab bag of 15 unmounted stamps with a retail value of $45-$50.
~ Third Place-Little Grab bag of 10 unmounted stamps with a retail value of $35-$40.

We have tons of summer themed rubber stamps such as our barbeque grill and utensils; tikis, palm trees, bathing beauties and hula girls; suns and clouds; hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream cones; circus scenes, posters and concessions; surfers; flowers; cars, trailers and roadside googie signs and lots more to give you inspiration.
Plus, right now we're offering a little Summer themed grab bag to help you get started on your Summertime crafting adventures. These can be purchased on our home page at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Happy Stamping!

Welcome to our Blog!

Hi there! Welcome to the new Sideshow Stamps blog. For those who aren't familiar with us, Sideshow Stamps is a rubber art stamp company that creates fun, quirky and beautiful art stamps with themes ranging from retro to creepy, swank to surreal, pop art to art nouveau. For our customers and those familiar with our stamps, this will be a place to keep up with what's going on in the world of Sideshow Stamps.
At the moment we are waiting for a shipment of brand new designs, including stuff like this:

We'll also have more creepy stamps for those who want an early start on Halloween cards, as well as a bunny, sparrow, pinata, nautical star and more! We will also be back in stock on lots of stuff for those who have been waiting for some of the retro owls, teardrop trailer, elephant, birthday cake, disco ball, etc.

We will also be using our blog to keep you updated on specials, sales, contests, etc. Right now we are still offering our special shipping deal...$1 shipping on orders subtotaling between $30 to $50.

We also have an incentive plan for anyone who posts a card on their blog or group forum using only Sideshow Stamps, with a clickable link to our site. If you do this, we will send you a free grab bag with 10 unmounted stamps. Just let us know...

Thanks for visiting and be sure to check back often for updates, upcoming contests and more surprises!

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com