Saturday, April 19, 2008

Crazy Over Inchies?

There's a new rage sweeping the stamping and paper-crafting world right now - actually it started several months ago - inchies! These are little bits of art, 1-inch square. When I first began noticing them, I admired all the pieces that I came across online, but thought "what the heck are you supposed to DO with them?!" So, I browsed some more and finally took the plunge and opted in for a swap on SSReflections.com Yahoo Group (click here for a link).

The swap has 26 players, each making 26 inchies of thier chosen letter of the alphabet. I chose "H". Here are two that I made for this swap. The one with the heart is my first ever inchie. Although it isn't "bad", I'm not very fond of it. I had a difficult time trying to figure out what I wanted the inchie to say because one inch isn't much space to say anything. This one is very "Valentine" in style ("H" is for "Heart").


But then, I really took a good long look at my friend Robin's blog and the samples she had posted for this same swap and realized that I didn't have to stick to my itty-bitty stamps. I began to look at my larger stamps in a whole new way - to see what portion of those stamps would fit onto this tiny canvas. Once I realized I didn't have to use an entire stamp image on the inchies, the second inchie I designed (see the picture above) began to take shape.


Getting my head around a 1-inch square piece of paper is an exercise in itself, and as I re-examined my stash of images, I was able to design several more. Here are six inchies that resulted from my exercise in imagination. Thank you Robin for your inspiration!


I still don't know what I'm gonna do with these bitty things, though. Some ideas:


  • Make an Inchie Album (for collecting - like postage stamps)

  • Use them in ATCs

  • Use them as accents on cards and/or scrapbook pages

I'm open to more ideas. Please feel free to leave a comment with your inchie-use suggestions!

4 comments:

Cindy Roland said...

Wow!! I am the first to comment!! Love love love your inchies!! I am telling you, I had the same opinion of them when I started. I could not figure out what the excitement was. First ATC's and now Inchies??? There is something so challenging about them and like you have discovered you can incorporate larger images and things for these crazy little works of art! I am impressed!!
I think of it as my effort to be "green", little scraps of paper that would normally be thrown out are now cut up into 1 inch canvases!
You always inspire me to want to do better! :)

Art By Wanda said...

Flo, your inchies are all wonderful!!!

Dragonlady said...

I think your inchies turned out just great, I am also in the SSR swap and they were my first inchies too....I had a lot of fun doing mine....you said you didn't kow what you were going to do with them, well, Do you have a Dollar Tree?..I found a small album and it has chipboard inside for pages and I plan on altering that and putting my inchies in....wish I could post a pic here...lol...pem me if you want to see a pic...
Brenda

Michi Michaelson, Orange County, CA said...

Ohhhhhhhhh, Flo!!! Your inchies are TO DIE FOR!!!! It's amazing that you put so much art into such a small canvas!!!!!!! I LOVE 'em!!!!!!