Mamhead Album–Experiments with Gel Medium and Infusions Stencilling

I did a bit more on my mini-album this afternoon, with mixed degrees of success I wanted to try a technique I found a few months ago on Ruth’s blog “A Love to Create” – using Infusions with transparent gel medium through a stencil. I was not as successful as she was, and spent some time trying to get this right. The results were not the same, and that may have been due to my using the wrong sort of substrate – a coated shimmery card which was a bit shiny.

The page I was trying to create was the pair to this one with the tracing on parchment paper which I’d painted with copper Perfect Pearls.

Below is my second attempt. Originally I stencilled around the bottom left corner of the page, using the corner of the stencil. This is a stencil I designed and cut myself using Inkscape and Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine. When I had done the first stencilling I didn’t like it very much, and I had made a bit of a mess with it anyway – I put on too much gel medium and it spread underneath the stencil in places, and it also lifted up some of the surface coating of the card.

I used Finnabair heavy body transparent gloss gel medium and spread it through the stencil onto the card, having masked off the bits I didn’t want at the top left corner. The second time I did this, the results were better, as I didn’t spread it so thickly, and whipped off the stencil immediately – you have to be careful to clean the stencil immediately too, or the gel medium will dry on.

While the gel medium was still wet, I sprinkled on a generous amount of Golden Sands Infusions powder and shook off the excess. I left it to stand for a while to try and get it to soak up the moisture from the gel medium but it remained stubbornly on the surface, and I got impatient and dried it with my heat gun. I rubbed off the excess which would have shed everywhere otherwise.

I wasn’t happy with it – there were some stray Infusions crystals on the background, and the whole thing didn’t look quite right, so I spritzed it with water which activated the loose crystals on the gel medium and on the background. I dried it with my heat gun. The effect was softer and more muted – more subtle – and the background had a slightly mottled spattered look which gave it a bit of texture. The next photo shows “before and after.”

I still wasn’t quite happy with it, so I added a bit of copper gilding wax over the leaves – the Infusions had left quite a rough surface, a bit like Distress Embossing Powder.

Here are the two pages, together with their copper-painted parchment paper pages. I’m fairly pleased with the result. The pages are a bit wrinkly so probably need putting under heavy books overnight to flatten them. It’s hard to photograph this particular card because it’s quite shimmery and shiny – it’s actually darker than this, and lighter than in the above photo. The Treasure Copper doesn’t show up much on this photo, either!

Speaking of which, remember this background I made yesterday?

After being under heavy books for 24 hours it was nicely flattened, and I cut it in half to make two pages, and distressed the edges using Forest Moss distress ink.

Here they are with their paired pages – the desaturated tree trunk with the green leaves. You can see the shimmer on the green background on this photo, as well as on the frame on the other page, painted with the same Interference Green Perfect Pearls.

I didn’t manage to achieve quite as much as I’d have liked today, because of the time I spent trying to get the results I wanted from the Infusions.