Elf Place Cards

We had friends over for Christmas dinner (lasagna and salad, so easy!) and even tho it was just 5 of us I wanted to make place cards for the dinner table - I don't usually do this for 5 people but because I made little gift bags for each of us I wanted everyone to sit in the right spot where their bag was.

I decided to use this Happy Holidays elf stamp from Stampin' Up since he's so dang cute and also he was still out from when Janis and I made tags the other day (click here for that post) 'cuz I'm lazy and haven't put all that away yet (!) - but I thought it'd be cute to put our names on the sign the elf is holding instead of the "happy holidays" that is part of the stamp.

To get rid of the "happy holidays" message but still be able to stamp the elf, I simply cut a piece of paper that fit exactly over the message, holding it in place with double sided tape - an even simpler method is to use a post-it note but they were all the way up in my office and (once again) I was lazy and didn't want to leave the craft room. A piece of paper and double-stick tape worked just fine to mask off the words on the stamp. After covering the words up, press the stamp into an ink pad making sure all the areas you want stamped have ink on them. Then carefully remove the piece of paper (it is now covered with ink) and the tape, and stamp the image onto paper.

Then I trimmed the paper so I could fold it in half and have it stand up, colored it in with markers, then wrote everyone's names on the sign.

the black square in the middle is the piece of paper taped in place
 after inking the stamp. the inky square is covering up the "happy
 holidays"message on the stamp

after removing the inked paper, just the elf
outline has ink on it

before and after

This is a fun and basic stamping technique for any stamps that you only want to use a portion of - just cover up the parts you don't want!