Birthday Card for my Hubby

My hubby’s birthday is on Tuesday, and I am so glad that Mr. Mojo and Mrs. Muse have decided to return from their unexpected long holiday and come to my rescue, so that I could make him a mixed media card! He has been so brilliant over the past months and I want to show my appreciation for him in every way that I can.

I am still taking baby steps creatively, and didn’t want to take on a huge project, so I thought it would be good to use some of the things in my stash to make his card. Here is the finished card.

Last year I had a session making alcohol ink backgrounds on the backs of some A5 fliers we’d picked up at the county show (I love recycling!) – they were on shiny paper.

I also embossed some co-ordinating pieces of card to go with each background.

For this card I chose the background using gold, silver, copper and pearl mixatives. This one had a nice co-ordinating card which I’d embossed with the Cuttlebug folder “Diamond Plate,” which is good and manly!

Rummaging through my stash, I found the Friendly Plastic gear wheels and other hardware that I’d made some time ago. These were painted with black gesso which makes a good base for adding gilding wax.

Also in my stash I found a few tissue paper hearts that somebody sent me once in a collection of die-cuts, and I chose one in a colour appropriate for this card, to lay down as a background under the embellishments, adding some gilding wax lightly applied with my finger.

Finally I made a faux porcelain sentiment for the card. You use UTEE (Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel) for this technique, building up the layers – I had several printed oval shapes  with “Happy Birthday” printed on them in a suitable font in my stash from a previous project. I used Versamark and my heat gun for this, and unfortunately it made the card curl a bit; I think it would probably distort less if one immersed the whole thing in UTEE in the meltpot, so I must remember this next time I use this technique. (Last time I started with a thicker piece made from several layers laminated together, and I think that distorted less.)

Here are some detail shots of the card.

For the “metal” hardware, I used a mixture of silver, gold and copper gilding wax. Of course, the metallic appearance doesn’t pick up too well on the photos.

On the above picture you can see that I have also applied some glass bead gel medium using a palette knife, and lightly applied some gold gilding wax with my finger, for a bit of added texture and to tie the design together.

I have had the large “blue steel” gear wheel in my stash for ages – I think it was a die-cut, and I cut it from a piece of card from Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate box! It has a lovely metallic shimmer to it. Across the bottom I added some glass bead gel medium with a palette knife and lightly rubbed this with gold gilding wax.

The inside of the card. I can’t remember where I got this sentiment stamp – it is part of a set of clear stamps I bought when I first started, and I didn’t keep the packaging. I don’t like clear stamps as much as rubber ones, and have only a few.

I inked the inside of the card, and the edge of the card base on the front, using Gathered Twigs distress ink and an Inkylicious Ink Duster. The card front was matted and layered with some brown cardstock. The Friendly Plastic embellishments were stuck down with Pinflair gel glue; the heart was attached with regular matt gel medium, and the large gearwheel with Scotch Quick Dry adhesive, and the remainder of the elements with my ATG glue gun. The faux porcelain sentiment was attached with two small brads through the matting and layering before I stuck that down onto the card base.

There is a lot of texture and thickness on this card! It’s a good thing I have a large supply of very heavy white cardstock for card bases or they’d never hold up, the amount of stuff I always put on my cards!

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!

Card for a Teacher

My cousin is a teacher, and her birthday is coming up soon. At the end of last year I started collecting together a few items to make a nice grungey card for her, and then forgot about it! I was intending to make something to go with the faux porcelain sentiment I made, and then remembered about the other stuff, and lo and behold, it goes perfectly! Here is what I have done.

The elements were taken from a Tim Holtz paper stack that I’ve got – I can’t remember which one it was, but I think it might have been Crowded Attic (or possibly Lost and Found). I laid them out on some background paper from the same stack and stuck them down with Pinflair photo glue, and the sentiment was what I have just made – faux porcelain, embellished with two dull brass coloured brads and adhered with Pinflair gel glue.

Here is the card with its envelope – a plain white one which I distressed with Antique Linen Distress Ink.

Detail of the embellishment, complete with its brads:

I am really pleased how well this goes with the other elements!

Finally, a picture of the card insert I made. I scanned the elements from the front of the card and made a digital layout, adding some other elements and an ink blot for good measure, and recoloured them to be the same. The paper was coloured with Antique Linen and Vintage Photo Distress Inks, and the edges distressed with my distressing tool. I also added some distress inks to the back of the base card to reduce its stark whiteness.

Being a teacher, I thought she might enjoy these vintage school images. She is also a very talented card-maker so I have to pull the stops out every year so she is not disappointed! She’s very discerning, and always appreciates how much work goes into hand-made cards, which is nice to know, because I suspect that many people have no idea, and put about as much value on an individually-made card as they do on a bought card!

Anyway, hope she enjoys a bit of vintage grunge from the King of Grunge!

Faux Porcelain Sentiments

For a birthday card I am making, I am following a tutorial on the Splitcoast Stampers site by Shelley Hickox for faux porcelain. I haven’t got all the ingredients for this, so I am having to compromise somewhat.

The first step was to create the card pieces which were going to be transformed. In Inkscape, I have designed a set of nesting ovals, which can be found on my Skydrive – this was following an excellent video tutorial by Carolyn of the Inkscape Cutting Designs forum, using the Interpolation method.

From this nested shape, I selected two adjacent ovals, and duplicated them so that I ended up with this.

This file can also be downloaded free from my Skydrive.

I cut the set of ovals using Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine, and stacked the three small ones together and held them in place with a dab of Pritt glue stick. I then lined up this stack with one of the larger ovals and again located it with a dab of Pritt. I embossed this in the Cuttlebug, using my No More Shims mat, with the following sandwich from bottom to top:

A Plate; ovals stack with large one uppermost; No More Shims mat; 2 B Plates.

This is what the oval looks like once embossed. It measures 2 1/4 x 1 5/8 in.

I removed all the small ovals, and replaced one in the recess, sticking it down firmly with Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive, an excellent firm-holding wet glue. I used this same glue to adhere the rest of the large ovals onto the back, making sure the glue went right to the edges, thus forming a laminated oval, nice and thick and ready to receive the faux porcelain treatment. I could have set up Sheba to cut the shape out of mount board, which would save a lot of time and effort, but I would not have been able to achieve the embossed effect. You can also purchase die-cut mount board shapes which would do as well.

If I had got myself organised and learnt how to do print and cut (contour cutting) on Sheba, I could have done the next step a bit more efficiently, and cut the oval already printed, but since I haven’t, I created a sentiment to fit the embossed oval, using Serif PagePlus (my desktop publishing software), together with circles to mark the attachment holes, and printed it on 100 gsm paper. The font is Engravers MT, which I think matches the project quite well – this is the sort of font you see on real porcelain pieces. I cut out the printed oval slightly oversized, lined it up on the laminated oval and glued it in place, pressing down around the embossing, and then carefully cut away the excess to fit the laminated oval. At this stage I pierced through the circles to create holes, into which I will eventually fit a couple of brads. Of course, if I had used mount board, I would not have been able to print on this, and would have to have used a rubber stamp, or alternatively, set up Sheba with a pen to write the text – this is last option is definitely something to try!

As you can see, there are always many different ways to achieve the desired end result, according to what equipment and materials are at your disposal – just because one doesn’t have everything that a tutorial says you need in order to complete a project, it doesn’t mean you can’t improvise!

The correct order to proceed with the faux porcelain effect is to apply the crackle paint first, and then stamp on top of it with archival black ink, but I did not have a suitable stamp. Since I was using Clear Rock Candy Crackle Paint, not having any white, I thought this would work OK.

The crackle paint is applied in quite a thick layer, and left to dry. The thicker the layer of paint, the larger the cracks will be. Once cracks start to appear, it’s OK to speed up the drying process with a heat gun.

As the crackle paint was applied over white paper, the cracks didn’t show up that much, and because I wanted a vintage look, I rubbed a small amount of Walnut Stain Distress Ink over the surface once the paint was dry, and then cleaned it off well, leaving the Distress Ink in the cracks.

It was now ready for the UTEE treatment. In case you don’t know, UTEE stands for Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel. This is somewhat different from ordinary embossing powder in that it is much more granular, and thicker. You cannot stamp with it and expect fine detail. It can be melted in a Ranger Melting Pot and items can be dipped into it to coat them, or you can apply it over the whole surface of something, as I am doing with this project. Applying Versamark clear embossing ink over the whole surface, one can then sprinkle on the UTEE (or dip the piece into the pot of UTEE, which is what I did), shake off the excess, and heat it with a heat gun to melt the UTEE all over the surface. This gives a wonderful glazed appearance, enhanced by the addition of further coats until the desired effect is achieved. Being clear UTEE, the detail of my piece (the text, the cracks and the Distress Ink) all show through.

This is the setup on my table, ready for heating the UTEE.

Detail of the first coat of UTEE applied, ready for heating. If you look closely, you can see how granular the UTEE is – almost like sugar, and quite unlike ordinary embossing powder.

This is how it appears after heating. You can see where the light catches the edge, that it has a rather lumpy appearance, which subsequent coats will smooth out.

After each coat, I poked through the holes again, to keep them open, while the UTEE was still soft.

Here is the finished tile, after 3 coats of UTEE have been applied. You can see how the irregularities have been smoothed out, and it has a genuine, glazed look. With the Distress Ink in the cracks, it has a nice beaten-up, vintage look to it!

Looking at it at an angle you can see the glazed effect where the light catches it.

Edge on, you can see the thickness of the laminated card, and the embossing. The whole thing has warped slightly, making it somewhat concave – I had expected that the layers might fall apart as the glue heated up, so it’s not too bad. This was all a bit of an experiment in improvisation, not having all the ingredients listed in the original tutorial, but I think it’s turned out OK in the end.

Now to make a card to put it on.