Mamhead Album–Backgrounds and Leaves

I spent some time in the studio this afternoon and made some more progress on my mini-album about our woodland walk last summer.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the frame around one of the photographs so I painted it with Interference Green Perfect Pearls. Some time ago I made a palette for my Perfect Pearls so that I could use them like watercolours. These little mica powder paints are so versatile! I thought the frame was a lot better after painting than it did before.

To make the paired page for this one, I created a background using an 8 x 6-inch piece of American Cardstock in white (what I have made most of the other pages from). It was created with a mixture of four distress inks (Iced Spruce, Bundled Sage, Pine Needles and Forest Moss) which I rubbed on the non-stick craft sheet and spritzed. I smooshed the card around in this but wasn’t quite satisfied with the result, so I added some Emerald Green Brushos, followed by some Emerald Isle Infusions to give a nice mottled background. The final step was to use a soft brush to add some dry Interference Green Perfect Pearls, and I spritzed the whole thing with water to set the Perfect Pearls, and dried it with my heat gun. The paper now has a lovely shimmer to it, which doesn’t really show on the photos.

Here’s the result. It is quite wrinkly so it’s gone under a pile of heavy books overnight, which should flatten it out OK.

Here’s a mock-up of the paired pages.

Once the background piece is flattened, I can cut it in half and use one for each copy of the album.

In the course of making it, I used a couple of pieces of kitchen paper to mop up the excess ink. The piece on the left now has all its white covered with ink and is ready for use in projects, and the one on the right is maturing nicely!

Here are the paired pages so far, with some of the photos not yet mounted on pages. I will either use suitable backgrounds from my backgrounds folder, or create new ones for these.

Turning to the traced parchment pages, I had a piece of deeply textured hand-made paper which I thought went particularly well with the gold page.

It needed a bit of distress ink added, so I selected several, and some of my home-made ink blenders to apply the ink lightly to the raised texture of the paper, beginning with Aged Mahogany.

This was followed by Dried Marigold.

Adding Frayed Burlap.

Finally, Vintage Photo, which I also used to distress the edges.

By this time, most of the Aged Mahogany had been obliterated, so I added some more.

By this time I was really happy with the result, and gently applied some gold gilding wax to the raised texture of the paper using my fingertip.

I then added some of the leaves made from inked Glassine Paper, using Pinflair gel glue so as not to flatten the hand-embossing I’d done on them. These leaves have a dull metallic sheen which goes very well with the inked background and with the gold of the tracing on the other page.

Here are the two pages side by side.

I am going to do something similar with the other traced pages, creating background pages with no photos on them, but with texture and colour to echo that of the traced page. These will add a bit of interest to the album and be a nice exercise in mixed media and an opportunity to experiment a bit.