Infusions Mini-Album–Additional Pages

Sorting through my Infusions samples and trying to arrange the pages into a satisfactory order, I realised that I probably needed to add a few. I had decided that I had far too many to make a single book, and divided them into three separate books which will all be bound in the same larger cover, but it was really hard to get them all more or less the same thickness. Some of the pages are simply glued back-to-back, and others are glued either side of a flattened toilet roll centre – these will have a tag inserted, which in turn will make the pages thicker. The middle book is quite a bit thinner than the other two, so I thought the simplest solution would be to add a few more pages, especially if I could add elements to thicken them up a bit!

Also, I needed one or two extra pages to make the pairings work properly, especially as I have to incorporate pages with the title of the next section.

The first additional page was made by dabbing Versamark embossing ink onto the page through a stencil – in this case, I used a piece I’d cut with Sheba, my Cougar electronic cutting machine, ages ago, to file away with my sample pieces with the machine settings I’d need to use for that particular medium. This worked pretty well as a stencil, but I had to be careful with the centres of the spirals which tended to lift a bit. I think I may use this file to cut a stencil from some other material as it’s quite nice, and with care, works well.

After applying the Versamark, I sprinkled some Sunset Beach Infusions from set 1, quite liberally, over the stencil. I spritzed this very lightly, with a fine mist from some distance above, so that it wouldn’t get too wet and flow under the thin sections of the stencil. I held it down as much as possible with my fingers, in addition to taping both the page and the stencil to my craft sheet with masking tape. After spritzing, I left it for several minutes to activate.

Here is the piece immediately after I carefully lifted the stencil away. You can see that the edges are sharply defined, and that it worked well.

After this I dried it with my heat gun, and brushed away any stray crystals that hadn’t activated.

The white background looked a bit stark, so I added some Distress Inks in Spiced Marmalade and Abandoned Coral, using an Inkylicious Ink Duster, and then some Vintage Photo to distress the edges of the sample, using a home-made ink blending pad. I used this particular colour scheme to pair it with another page.

Here is the completed piece.

To bulk up Book Two a bit, I did another page with some gesso, this time stamping into wet gesso. For this, I used some of the stamps from the Stampin’ Up “Mosaic Madness” set, sticking them all onto an acrylic block and stamping them all at once into the wet gesso. I was careful to clean them off immediately after doing this, because gesso dries very quickly and I didn’t want to ruin my stamps.

I dried the sample with my heat gun and once I was satisfied it was dry enough, I sprinkled on some Violetta Infusions from set 2. I spritzed it until it was very wet, and almost immediately blotted it off with kitchen paper to create a pale background, with darker areas where the stamping was.

I spritzed it again, and tilted the card to move the Infusions around, making sure they pooled in the stamped areas, and then I added a very small amount of Infusions, and left this to stand, in order to activate them.

I realised that I hadn’t included my “mask and spray” technique, which I’d be sad to omit, since I think I invented this! I did it first with Dylusions spray inks, but thought it would also work with Infusions, which it did. I made two 12 x 12 sheets and I used nearly all of these when I bound my Mamhead mini-album at the beginning of this year, but I still had a few offcuts left, together with some flowers and leaves that had been used in the masking process, so I decided to use these in the Infusions mini-album.

This is a mock-up I’ve done to show some of the cut leaves and flowers laid onto a page made from the remaining leaf mask and spray offcuts.

Here are the four additional pages together.

All the pages I’ve completed have been flattened under heavy books, and stacked together with elastic bands into their respective three volumes. I need to make a few more pages for Book Two, and then the next step will be to make the title pages for each section, and then start on the tags. Once this is done, and the tags are all inserted into the right pages, I will be able to make the binding, as I will know how thick each page will be. When the three small books are bound, I can begin on the large outer binding. Still a lot to do, but now that the page organisation is pretty much sorted, the end is in sight!