Category Archives: Technique

Butterflies thinlits dies for the New Year

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I decided to make a card to celebrate Chinese New Year but I don’t have any stamps of goats so I have chosen to concentrate on red and gold instead. At the recent crop weekend, I saw an embossed resist technique using a brayer, elastic bands, embossing powder and sponging. I simplified it for this card.

I liberated a couple of different width elastic bands from the kitchen drawer and wrapped them around my brayer ensuring that they crossed and twisted. I then took a piece of real red cardstock and after rubbing it with the embossing buddy to remove static, inked up my brayer with versamark and rolled it across the card in a couple of directions. Then I sprinkled on gold embossing powder and heated it. It creates a very cool looking custom made DSP.

Stampin' Up! Butterflies Thinlits Dies

Whilst I was contemplating what could stand up to this background, the mailman brought me the Stampin’ Up! Butterflies Thinlits dies and I knew I had to use them immediately! I cut out the middle sized butterfly in real red and in gold foil. I’ve heard that you can use dryer sheets so that you don’t have to poke out all the cutouts but I found that I got dryer debris on my cutting plates and on the die. I decided to just poke out the pieces with my piercing tool. I cut another piece of real red just large enough to fit the butterflies. I glued the gold foil butterfly flat to the card stock and then attached the real red butterfly just in the middle so that the wings give a three dimensional effect.

Stampin' Up! Butterflies Thinlits Dies

I mounted this onto a base of real red. I decided that this card needed a slightly larger envelope so as to not crush the butterfly’s wings. I took a piece of 8.5″ by 8.5″ real red card stock and using the envelope punch board created a 4.5″ by 6″ envelope. I used sticky strip to glue the envelope together and did so fairly loosely so that there’s a bit of extra room. It fits perfectly! I then embossed the envelope flap to match the background.

Real red envelope with gold embossed flap

 

Technique Tuesday – Emboss Resist

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I have only used my large background stamp, the Stampin’ Up! Swallowtail set a couple of times and I decided it was time to play with it again.

Stampin' Up! Swallowtail

I used the embossing buddy on the very vanilla paper and then stamped the image in versamark and used the clear embossing powder. After heating the image, I used rich razzleberry and using a sponge, started in the centre of the image letting the ink fade as I sponged to the edges. The thing to remember about sponging is that you can add ink, you can’t remove it so it’s best to blot the sponge on scrap paper to get a sense for how much ink you have. The embossed image resists the ink (hence the name of the technique). After I’d sponged the entire paper, I used some daffodil delight to gently colour the middle parts of the butterfly. I mounted this onto a rich razzleberry base.

Make your own DSP

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I’m still hooked on the colour combination in the All is Calm DSP from the Holiday catalogue – lost lagoon, pear pizzazz and pool party. After I played with the baby wipes and a rainbow of colours recently, I wondered about my current 3 favourite colours on a block and the first use of my spritzer. So I put a few ink drops of each colour on a D block, spritzed it with water and pressed the block onto whisper white paper. I got different effects depending upon how much water I added and whether I moved the block around to get the colours to mix more. This is definitely a fun way to make custom DSP! Since I used ordinary paper, rather than watercolour, it took some time to dry. Actually I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the results and they sat on my desk for about a week. One made a nice tag for one of my mother’s Christmas gifts. And another was recently turned into a card.

Stampin' Up! Larger Than Life

I embossed the letter E from the Stampin’ Up! Larger than Life alphabet set in clear embossing powder. I really like the effect of this on the varied background colours. I then cut it out using the 4th largest square framelit and cut out the next size up in lost lagoon and glued them together. It was then a simple matter of mounting this square on the pear pizzazz card base. I lined the envelope in the backgrounds DSP in pear pizzazz (subtles collection).

Although the Larger than Life set is expensive, it is definitely worth it in my opinion – especially if you get it (as I did) as a free set by meeting a demonstrator challenge. I’ve earned 6 free sets now in the 7 months I’ve been a demonstrator, definitely yet another reason to sign up.

Technique Tuesday – sponging

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I partially CASEd the idea of this card from Susan Itell, on another stamp from the Seasonally Scattered set,  but she did it with sponge daubers, and I didn’t have any! I just used sponges.

merry silver, wisteria, blue

It’s a very Clean and Simple (CAS) card – my favourite kind of card.

Base: Very vanilla

Mat: Wisteria Wonder

Top layer: very vanilla

Stamp set: Seasonally scattered

Inks: wisteria wonder, night of navy, silver

I inked up the image with wisteria wonder and then took sponges to dip into the silver ink and the night of navy (separate sponges so as to keep my ink pads clean) and applied them randomly to the stamp. Then I stamped onto the cardstock. Clearly this will give different results each time. Just be cautious and ensure that the stamp and sponges are not transferring other colours to the ink pads. I think it’s a very easy way of getting an effective image – and a unique one.

Once you’re done with this card, you may notice that the MERRY doesn’t look quite right. The first R looks as if you made a mistake.

R in Merry

There’s a bit too much white space so it looks as if there’s something missing. I just took a marker and added a few dots so that the R looked a bit more regular.

Technique Tuesday – Masking and Sponging

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Masking and sponging is a lot of fun – and gives me an opportunity to showcase yet another Christmas card. 🙂 My eagerly anticipated back-ordered stamp set White Christmas arrived last Thursday and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

white christmas car and tree

Base: 8.5″ by 5.5″ whisper white

Mat: 4″ by 5.25″ cherry cobbler

Top Layer: 3.75″ by 5″ whisper white

Stamp set: White Christmas

Ink: Memento black ink (I really like that the usual Stampin’ Mist will clean this off stamps – and it doesn’t smudge), soft sky.

Colouring: Cherry cobbler blendabilities (medium), colour lifter and garden green stampin’ marker

I started by stamping the trees onto a piece of scrap card. This image includes the hill. I cut along the line of the hill and let it extend to the edge of the card to create the mask. Then I took my top layer piece of whisper white and put the mask in place and using a sponge, dabbed soft sky onto the upper portion of the card. I ensured that I didn’t make it a uniform colour – since the sky isn’t – and ended up with the effect of a cold cloudy day.

Next I stamped the trees and then the car on the hill and then the tree on top of the car. It was easy to get the placement because this set is a see through photopolymer set. I coloured the car with the cherry red blendability medium pen and used the colour lifter under the windows for a bit of contrast. Colouring the tree in garden green was the final step before sticking all the layers together. Of course I lined the envelope using the background DSP stack and the envelope liner framelits. I’ve been finding that it’s more efficient – and quite relaxing – to cut a 12″ by 12″ sheet from this stack into 8 pieces of 3″ by 6″ and run them all through the big shot one after another to produce 8 envelope liners. This may be because my big shot lives on the opposite side of the table from where I stamp and it saves me from getting up to cut out a single (or more) liner.