Craft Focus - Oct/Nov (Issue 63)

Tell us a bit about your background. How your passion for cardmaking began? I’ve always crafted in some way or another. I just love making things! My passion for cardmaking began when I was around nine years old and was crafting with my Grandma. She’s very creative and paints, makes teddy bears and likes papercrafting. My Grandma gave me a rubberstamping kit for Christmas, and taught me how to stamp, colour and make cards. I remember stamping the images with a black inkpad, colouring them with pencils and adding glitter! I then started to sell my cards to friends and family, and it snowballed into supplying shops and exhibiting at Christmas craft fairs, and that led me to designing my own products What made you decide to create you own brand of stamps and dies? I started designing my own stamp range when I left college at 18 years old. I really wanted to design something different in my style, which is quite modern and contemporary as I could never find the designs I wanted so I put pen to paper and drew my own. I started with a Christmas release of poinsettias and branches for hanging ornaments and stockings. I can remember the very first stamp released – I’d managed to buy 20 of each design as a tester, we packed them around the dining room table, and I’d printed and guillotined all of the insert cards myself. These were so well-received and sold out straight away. We then doubled the order, and still the stamps kept selling out, and it was from here Stamps by Chloe was born. What inspires you when designing a new product? I’m inspired by allsorts of things, whether it’s seeing a pattern that I like on some fabric or clothing, or a beautiful flower which I’ve seen when out walking. Colour is also very important to me when designing and we’re proud to work closely with WOW Embossing Powders to produce our own exclusive mixes of embossing glitters, which I’ve blended and mixed to work with the Stamps by Chloe range. We talk to Chloe Endean who puts the sparkle into cardmaking with her stamp and die-cut brand Stamps by Chloe rise and shine 70 craft focus