Birthday Card Using Gold Seahorses Masterboard and Acetate

THE BIG REVEAL, PART 2.

This is the second of two posts today.

Many of my regular visitors have been justifiably very frustrated and impatient with me lately because I’ve been working hard on several secret projects that I wasn’t at liberty to reveal until now. With her permission, I can now reveal that I have been making stuff for Shaz. As many of you will know, she is about to undergo major surgery and has been through so much over the past year. She and her lovely hubby share the same birthday and I have made cards for them both, a get well card for her (still under wraps) and a selection of bits and pieces for her to play with once she feels up to being creative again. She opened the parcel on her birthday (14th Aug.) and now that she has received them I can share the making of them with you. Until now, I didn’t want to spoil her surprise as she visits my blog regularly. Throughout my own cancer journey, this wonderful friend has been such an encouragement and support to me, and this is one way I can thank her, and show my own appreciation and support. I know that she would love a visit from you to wish her well for her surgery on 2nd Sept.

I shall be uploading a couple of posts each day over the next few days until all is revealed. Please scroll down for earlier posts.

Birthday Card Using Gold Seahorses Masterboard and Acetate

My gold seahorses masterboard is diminishing in size rapidly! I don’t mind, because this is what I created it for. I have made a birthday card for Shaz, using this masterboard, this time cutting three strips of masterboard of varying lengths, and arranging them vertically on the card.

This card is quite three-dimensional and has plenty of varied texture.

The pieces of masterboard laid onto the base card to show the positioning.

I matted and layered the masterboard strips with some slightly textured gold card. I did not want this layer to be too dominant but I needed it to be visibly gold, so I chose a card which was not highly reflective.

On the middle one, you can see I made a boo-boo when trimming the gold card, but this will be covered up later so it didn’t matter.

I rummaged in my stash and found some scraps of acetate which would suit my purpose.

Using my alcohol ink blending tool, I applied three shades of alcohol inks to the acetate pieces (Adirondac Stream and Clover, and Piñata Sapphire Blue) and dropped a few drops of alcohol blending solution to create the lighter patches, with the size of the patches diminishing with each layer.

On the third one, I added the alcohol blending solution onto the applicator instead, which produced the smaller circles.

Here is a mock-up showing the layers of acetate in place. At this stage only the upper edge of each strip has been cut in undulating curves to represent the waves of the sea.

I then cut the bottom edge of each strip into curves like the upper edges, as these would show through the layers above.

I toyed with the idea of adding some of the narrow offcuts of acetate to the top of the card, because the top is rather devoid of interest and I do not want to create an unbalanced card, but I soon abandoned this idea and put these pieces in my stash to be used on something else.

Beginning to ink the background of the card base. The other night I watched a brilliant video on how to create a random-looking mixed colour background, using the corner-corner-side method. I had never heard of this before, but basically you take your first colour and blend it into two corners on one side of the card, and in the middle of the opposite side. I began this with Broken China distress ink.

I then chose Evergreen Bough distress ink and proceeded to blend this into the opposite corners and side of the card, more or less filling the gaps.

The final step was to blend in some Peacock Feathers distress ink to fill any gaps, and a light brushing over the whole surface to integrate the background. I am thrilled to have discovered this technique as it gives very good results.

Unfortunately the photos don’t really show up the subtleties of the colours or of the blending.

Here is a mock-up of the card, duly inked, with the three strips of masterboard and the three pieces of inked acetate. Being transparent, you can see the wavy outline of the bottom of each piece through the layers on top.

I stuck down the masterboard strips with double sided tape, and then the top layer of acetate using a little tacky glue at the sides.

Laying down the second layer, I wanted there to be a gap between the layers, so I used Pinflair gel glue to lift the piece proud of the background. You can see the glue very clearly in the photos, but in reality it is not so obvious.

Here is a detail, you can see the blobs of gel glue on the right.

Most people use their Pinflair glue in a syringe. However, I no longer do this, because I can go several weeks or months without using Pinflair glue and if you don’t use up the contents of the syringe pretty quickly, it sets in the syringe. I find one has a lot more control if one squeezes a little glue out of the tube and catches it with a cocktail stick, which is a useful implement for applying the glue and for getting the blob the right thickness. This glue takes a long time to dry, but when it is dry, it remains crystal clear and has a rubbery texture, so it is very useful for dimensional pieces and I usually use it instead of self-adhesive foam squares. I also use it to prop up flower petals and the wings of butterflies to prevent them from getting flattened, especially on cards that have to survive the ravages of the post; being transparent, it really doesn’t show.

Here are all three pieces of acetate, stuck down with Pinflair. Both edges of the second layer are supported by a blob of Pinflair on the bottom layer in the middle, and the top layer is supported on the middle layer, at the one-third and two-thirds mark, to allow the tag to go between them and sit in the centre of the card.

I added some stickles (glitter glue) in three colours: turquoise, green, and star dust, following the curves of the waves and adding some spirals in the turquoise and green. I used the star dust to go along the edges of the waves. I placed the spirals over the blobs of pinflair glue and they disguise them very well. As usual, the camera has failed to pick up the blinginess of this!

That was the front of the card pretty well finished. I now moved on to work on the tag, and found this happy birthday sentiment in my box of small things cut using Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine. I have not had this up and running for a long time, and am glad that I still have some pieces in reserve.

I heat embossed the background pieces with gold.

I inked the sentiment words with Peackcock Feathers distress ink.

I glued them onto their backing pieces using Crafter’s Companion Stick & Stay spray adhesive which allows a bit of repositioning before setting in place. You can see my home-made spray booth in this picture!

The completed sentiment pieces.

The tag was inked in the same manner as the card base, using Broken China, Evergreen Bough and Peacock Feathers distress inks, as before.

Here is the back of the tag, inked as the front, with some water droplets having been spattered onto it.

The finished tag, showing the different yarns and ribbons that I used to complete the top. I wanted to capture the essence of seaweed and I think the selection works well. I stuck the sentiment down onto the tag using tacky glue, paying particular attention to where the word “Birthday” has to dip down and make contact with the surface of the tag between the two vertical strips. I added a few spots of Stickles to the sentiment, and a small charm to the top.

The completed back of the tag with its water spatters. I love how one spatter has run down and made a trail across the tag.

I also made an ATC to celebrate the 6th anniversary of WOYWW which happened this year – our weekly blog hop when we visit each other’s work desks. I did not take part in the ATC swap but thought I’d add one to this card.

I wrote the text with my embossing pen and heat-embossed it in gold to match the seahorse, and rubbed my Versamark pad around the edge of the ATC and heat-embossed that in the same way, resulting in a nice distressed-looking border. This ATC was made from a fragment of the seahorses masterboard which I’d cut off when doing another project, and it was fractionally too small, so I mounted it with double sided tape onto one of my ATC backing pieces with the details on it – before sticking the two pieces together I inked the edge of the backing piece with Milled Lavender distress ink which echoes the colour of the water droplets on the background. The face of the backing piece was inked with Peacock Feathers distress ink to match the front.

This is the completed card front without the tag. Originally I was going to put the sentiment at the top right of the card but then remembered it was going on the tag, and there was rather a blank patch in that area, and all the interest at the bottom made the card look a little unbalanced, so with a dark blue marker pen I drew some flying birds.

Here is the finished card with the tag, and the ATC tucked in behind.

I spritzed inside the card with water and sprayed some Dylusions spray ink along the top in three patches: London Blue, Fresh Lime and Vivid Turquoise. I spritzed it again with water and held the card up to let the ink run down, and then I blotted it with kitchen paper.

I was rather proud of myself that I didn’t get this ink all over the front of the card!! I am such a messy worker that I knew I was taking a huge risk by spraying all this liquid on the inside!

The sentiment was from my stash. It was cut with my Cougar cutting machine ages ago from American Crafts cardstock and I stuck down with Crafter’s Companion Stick & Stay spray adhesive. I wrote the message inside with a green marker pen.

I repeated the spray inking on the front of the envelope.

Happy birthday my dear friend! – and to your lovely hubby too.

Teabag Art–Acrylic Film with Tea

Following on from my previous Teabag Art post, what to do with all that tea that came out of the teabags?? As this is such a frugal, recycling sort of project, it did seem a shame to waste it, and while working on the teabags, I had time to mull over how I might incorporate the dried, used tea in my Teabag Art projects. This is what I came up with.

Judi Hurwitt, whose blog I follow, recently posted about creating acrylic films for use in mixed media projects, and I knew I had the answer.

First of all I found a small piece of write-on acetate film, and onto this I drew the squiggles and text with Scotch Quick-Dry adhesive, which comes in a bottle with a nice small nozzle, and is good and sticky. I sprinkled the tea over this and shook off the excess, and set it aside to dry.

I laid the acetate with its tea design onto a larger piece of waxed paper, to catch any overflow of gel medium.

Judi used soft gloss gel medium but I thought this looked a bit thick in the pot, and likely to shift the tea if I started painting it on, or applying it with a palette knife, so instead I chose an acrylic polymer, which is a thickish liquid in a bottle, and squirted that all over the tea. I set it aside to dry, and this took a very long time indeed, because it was so fluid. I also had to try and disperse a number of tiny bubbles that had appeared – I may have been less than careful with the bottle – shaking the liquid introduces bubbles which can be hard to get rid of. I was unable to prick them as their surface tension seemed to be too great, so I pushed them to the edges using my pokey tool. Laborious and time-consuming, but worth the effort in the end.

I kept checking on it, and was not satisfied that it was dry enough to handle for several days. The joys of mixed media art… it certainly develops the virtue of patience (or not!!)… At least in my new ARTHaven, there is plenty of room for setting aside things to dry, while one can work on other things.

Eventually it was dry enough to peel off the waxed paper – the top felt quite dry if a little tacky, but as I peeled it off it was clear that it was still very wet underneath. However, I felt that removing the waxed paper gave the air a chance to get at it and speed up the drying process. After several days it was possible to peel off the acetate sheet, and then to leave it to dry completely.

It was very experimental, and I had no idea if the acrylic polymer would work, or whether it would contain the tea sufficiently for there to be no shedding, but all was well, and I will be able to cut this piece of film into pieces to use in different projects. Here is the video of the whole process.

80th Birthday Card–Mixed Media

Warning – long post with lots of photos!

My hubby reminded me the other day that we are invited to an 80th birthday party on Sunday, and would I like to make a nice card? So Shoshi has pulled out all the stops these past few days and come up with something I think she will like!

As you know from my previous posts, I’m about to take part in a flower swap with Judy in Australia. Unfortunately the flowers have had to take a back seat this week while I made this card. From flowers to butterflies! I told a friend on Sunday, “I love butterflies!” She said, “Oh, really? I’d never have guessed.” (She was being ironic. Lol!)

So – the card. I wanted to use my new Dylusions Ink Sprays, and made a background in the same way as I did my flower backgrounds, by putting the cut shapes down on the paper and then spraying, and turning them over and moving them, and spraying again. The large butterfly background isn’t 100% but I may do something with it – my large leaf one was disappointing till I had another go at it.

I cut all the butterflies with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. Most of the shapes are Penny Duncan’s cut files but I’ve used one of my own (not visible in these pictures).

I was very pleased with how well Sheba cut these out. The only problem was the detailed one with many holes. There was a tendency for the tiny pieces to be lifted up by the blade and carried along with it, preventing further cuts. I’ve experienced this problem before, despite using my brayer very vigorously to stick the card down well onto the mat. This time, I reduced the cutting speed right down to 25, and watched very carefully as it cut – at the first sign of trouble, I hit the pause button and removed the offending loose piece. I had to remove the whole blade holder several times, remove the blade and pick the tiny pieces out of the holder – really boring to have to do this, but worth it in the end as I got a pretty well perfect cut on those particular shapes. I’d set SignCut to cut the smallest pieces first, so once they were done, I checked the blade one more time, and then set the velocity back up to 100 and cut the rest.

Here’s the pierced butterfly with its mat layer (seen in the centre of the above photo). I just laid them out like this to show how the layers work – I was not intending to use them like this because there wasn’t enough contrast. You can see what an excellent job the Black Cat Cougar does with cuts like this.

This is the background that I sprayed onto the base card for this birthday card, using mostly small butterflies to create the pattern.

Here are some other parts that I cut from white card using Sheba:

The large piece will be used inside the card. I designed the sentiment (and everything else) in Inkscape – in this case, text on a path, and created the shape and scalloped mat layer (using the interpolate feature of pattern on a path). In the end, I didn’t use this scalloped piece but cut some more in gold, and used one of those. The text was done with a purple gel pen in Sheba’s pen holder – this is a brilliant accessory which enables you to draw and write in addition to cutting with the machine, and you can use any font on your computer. The frame would be inked and used inside the card.

This shows how the mat layer fits under the text to give the scalloped edge (this is just laid on top, not stuck down).

I filled a whole A4 sheet of gold mirror card with butterflies, frames and text mats so that I’d have some in my stash as well as providing enough for this project. Here is the gold mirror card still on the cutting mat immediately after cutting.

The gold card being removed from the mat – “weeding” the waste card first, leaving the pieces still stuck down on the mat.

The pieces removed.

Here you can see Penny’s double-layered butterfly. The top one has the mat layer in gold with the pierced part on top being one of my inked pieces, and for the lower one, the cut pieces are reversed. I had to decide which I preferred for this card, and chose the second one.

Here is the front of the card with a gold frame adhered around the aperture.

Inking the inside of the card. For this I used an Inkylicious Ink Duster to apply Dusty Concord Distress Ink.

Here is the smaller piece to line the inside of the card, being inked with Dusty Concord and Black Soot Distress Inks around the edge, and Picked Raspberry (one of the Summer special seasonal edition inks) for the centre. I wanted a bit of contrast with the base card, but still keeping within the general colour scheme.

A lot of people have been intrigued by my suggestion that I would use all that kitchen paper that I’d used to mop up my ink! It seems that most people think this is bizarre, and they can’t think how it could be used – most people simply throw it away, and I hope I can convince them that this is a waste when you can make beautiful things from it. I had one piece that I’d used scrunched up to mop up some ink, and not on the roll, and it had a gorgeous creased design on it from the two colours, so I cut a rectangle of this to put underneath the window of the card.

Here it is, having Golden regular matt gel medium applied on the back with a palette knife. This made the two layers of the kitchen paper pull apart, so I laid down the one with the gel medium on it, and scrunched it around a bit, but it started to tear, so I took the other layer and placed it on top, sticking it down with a small amount of gel medium around the edges.

The bottom layer became quite firm after the gel medium had dried, and this supported the upper layer very well, so in the end I was pleased with the result. Here it is with the lining piece stuck down to cover the edges, and the other gold frame around the aperture.

The next step was to stick the acetate over the window of the card. I did this from the inside, using Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive, which has to be my absolute favourite wet glue – it’s awesome! (Thank you Lucy – Lucy introduced me to this glue and it is now known as “Lucy’s Glue” lol!)

The edge of the acetate stuck down inside the card needed to be covered up. This is where the white frame came in. I inked it with Picked Raspberry Distress Ink. (I love this colour!)

Here it is in place. Does that look like kitchen paper in the right-hand aperture? My hubby thought it was fabric! I just couldn’t throw this delicious piece away! This effectively completes the inside of the card, apart from the 3-D flying butterflies. (After taking this photo, I decided it needed something more, and added some water spatters which improved it a lot – photos further down.)

This is how it looked with the sentiment mounted on its gold scalloped mat and adhered to the outside of the card. The white card of the sentiment was lightly inked with Picked Raspberry Distress Ink before being glued down.

I then selected a few of the gold butterflies and painted them with alcohol inks, using a Ranger fillable alcohol ink pen filled with blending solution, and my recently created alcohol inks palette. As you can see, it worked a treat! The larger gold butterfly (top right) has not been painted – what you can see is just reflection. The colours I used were a selection of purply pink, green and blue. I didn’t use all the butterflies – the rest have gone in my stash.

Here they are on the front of the card, together with the double-layered butterfly. The bodies of the butterflies were all stuck down with a small quantity of hot glue, and the wings folded upwards. (The butterflies on the bottom right look darker than this in real life – as usual it’s hard to photograph reflective surfaces.) The only thing still remaining to be done is to add a tiny amount of Pinflair gel glue under the wings of the butterflies to prevent them being flattened.

I have forgotten who pointed me in the direction of the video tutorial for the 3-D flying butterfly card but thank you, whoever you are! I was so taken with this design and decided straight away that I wanted to make it. You take a circle of acetate and lay it on top of a sketch of a spiral done on a piece of scrap paper, and holding the two together, you use the paper as a pattern and cut along the spiral line. The paper can then be discarded.

In the video, she used glue dots to fix this up, but I prefer something a bit stronger, so ensuring that I used laser acetate to make the spiral because this is heat-proof, I used my hot glue gun to stick the centre of the spiral down onto the centre of the inside of the card, and the outer end onto the inside of the card front. When you open the card, the spiral therefore opens up like a spring.

Several butterflies were then stuck onto the spiral, checking through the front aperture to make sure they were placed correctly. When you open the card, it appears that the butterflies are flying in the space! Very effective and certain to gain a “Wow”! Thanks for the great video tutorial, Bernie!

Here is the finished card, closed. You can see the butterflies through the acetate window.

Here is is open:

The final embellishment was the “80” to go in the top right hand corner of the card. I decided to do some more faux porcelain for this, this time making a circular piece, and distressing it with pink ink for a slightly different effect from my first, very grungey effort. Here is the final result, with the medallion adhered to the front of the card with hot glue, and the addition of a short length of ribbon.

This is the inside of the card. As you open it, the acetate spiral, attached to the left-hand side of the inside of the card and in the centre of the right-hand side, is pulled apart like a spring, and the butterflies appear to float between the two halves.

Here’s a detail of the water spatter effect I did on the inside. I think this really lifts the background and improves it a lot.

This is a detail shot of the butterflies on the acetate spiral. They are stuck with hot glue, as are the ends of the spiral.

Finally, the envelope. I lightly inked the edges with more Picked Raspberry Distress Ink, and stamped a butterfly in the corner with the same ink.

I am pleased to have finished this card well ahead of Sunday. That’s a weight off my mind. Back to the flowers again now!