Card for a Centenarian–Box for the Card

Having completed the card yesterday, today I worked on embellishing a box for it, as it is too thick for an envelope.

The box was in my stash, and originally contained some samples of stoma supplies! (Nothing goes to waste chez Shosh…)

I painted the bottom, sides and edges of the top with black acrylic paint.

Inside the box, I sprayed it with some pink shimmer spray that I’ve had from when I started papercrafting, many years ago!

I noticed some had got on the bottom of the box and I really liked the effect of it on black (something I’d never tried before) so I ended up spraying the whole thing with it.

I thought the inside needed something a bit extra, so I painted on a thin layer of soft gloss gel medium diluted with water, and sprinkled on some variegated copper gilding flakes, dabbing them into place with the paintbrush.

I wasn’t really happy with it, so I made up a wash of gold acrylic paint with some iridescent medium and painted that on. It was really shimmery but the brush strokes showed more than I wanted, and this was particularly obvious on the lid, unfortunately.

Here’s a detail of the effect. You don’t really get the shimmer from the photo.

In the end, I covered the inside of the lid with some of the paper left over from making the card, first distressing the edges with Evergreen Bough and then Forest Moss Distress Inks. This improved the look of it.

Here is the card in the box. It will be wrapped in tissue paper.

The front of the box completed. As with the card, I added some stickles to the butterfly’s body, and to the centres of the flowers – Holly, and Magenta. In this photo, they still aren’t dry.

I used scraps of the cards and paper used for the card. The circular die cut was one of several in my stash that a friend sent me ages ago. The flowers were more left over from the Floral Mini-Album, and the butterfly is another die cut from the set I used for the card. I used the same two ribbons, and where the “Congratulations” gold card meets the decorative paper, I added a thin strip of gold card from my stash, trimmed when making some other project in the past.

Here is a detail of the floral embellishment.

As with the butterflies on the card, I lifted the wings of this butterfly and secured them in place with a blob of Pinflair gel glue under each one, to stop them being flattened.

Now that the card is fully dry, I can return to it and show you the finished result. Here are a couple of detail photos showing the topper and embellishments.

The sentiment on the inside of the card.

Finally, a photo of the box, the card and the embroidered piece, all for a remarkable lady whose 100th birthday we shall be celebrating with her at her party tomorrow.

I can’t believe I’ve completed this lot in under a week! The trouble is, apart from making bread, that’s all I’ve done this week, and everything else has been neglected!

Infusions Mini-Album–Working on the Tags

The second of two posts for today.

I actually managed to do some art today – for the first time for goodness knows how long. I managed to extricate myself from the kittens and spent a couple of hours in the studio, working on the tags for the Infusions mini-album.

I began with the title tag for the “Various Effects” section, listing the three techniques on the front of the tag.

The background was created using Black Knight and Are You Cerise Infusions from Set 1, sprinkling on the Infusions and then spritzing with water, and I repeated this for the reverse of the tag.

It was so long since I’d done any of this project that I’d forgotten that I was going to use Distress Inks and a minimum of Infusions on the tags! Having done it, I didn’t want to waste the tag, so proceeded with it, using the white Uniball Signo pen for the text, which matches the tag holder.

The next one was for “Drips,” on the front of the tag.

I inked the background for both sides using Spun Sugar, Worn Lipstick, Picked Raspberry and Victorian Velvet Distress Inks, applied with Inkylicious Ink Dusters. I sprinkled on a small quantity of Are You Cerise and Black Knight Infusions (both from Set 1) and spritzed it with water, and then dried the tag with the heat gun. I spattered this with water and blotted it off for a bit of texture, and dried the tag before adding the text with my white Uniball Signo marker pen. As I am doing for all the tags, I distressed the edges with Black Soot Distress Ink, using a home-made ink blending tool (just visible on the far left of the above picture).

The “Kissing” tag. This was done on the reverse of the “Drips” one.

I chose colours of Distress Inks to match as far as possible the two “kissing” pages. These were Tumbled Glass, Stormy Sky and Faded Jeans, all blue Distress Inks, and then Crushed Olive, Peeled Paint and Forest Moss in green, and finally a little Fossilised Amber. The Infusions I used were Royal Blood and Golden Sands from Set 1. I wrote the text using a black permanent archival pen and the white Uniball pen.

The “Infusions with Glimmer Mists” tag was made by inking Scattered Straw Distress Ink over the entire surface of both sides of the tag, using an Inkylicious Ink Duster. On the front, I sprinkled some Lemoncello Infusions from Set 1, sparingly, on two of the corners and dried it with my heat gun, and repeated the process on the back, using a bit more Infusions to cover the surface.

I spritzed both sides with my DIY Glimmer Mist made from Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink re-inker in water, with some Perfect Pearls added. The blue of the Glimmer Mist mixed nicely with the yellow of the Scattered Straw Distress Ink to create bits of green. Those little spray bottles don’t give a really fine spray, unfortunately, so I think in future I need to use my mini-misters instead. The text was done with a black archival pen.

These are the little mop-up pieces so far – for each tag I am creating a new one of these, to clean up the non-stick craft sheet and provide a resource for future projects. Each one is edged with Black Soot Distress Ink.

I’ve finished the “Miscellaneous Techniques” section and the next section to be done will be the “Painting” section.

Card Factory–Card from Recycled Wedding Service Sheet

In my stash I’ve got various old service sheets from weddings etc., some of which were printed on nice card or paper that was too good to throw away. I have a few of this particular one, A4 folded to A5 size, and some sheets that are blank on the back, so I glued an A5 sheet inside to cover the printing – this would also serve to strengthen it, as the card isn’t that thick for supporting embellishments etc. The card is cream-coloured, with a slight texture, and is slightly mottled.

Also in my stash I still have some absolutely ghastly duplex (double-sided) card that I posted about ages ago – the card itself is super quality, really thick and stiff, but the colours! Oh my goodness. Get your sunglasses out, folks. I’ve decided to use the orange side of this piece, rather than the bright cerise pink (whoever thought of putting those two garish colours together??!) and tone it down with lots of distressing, stencilling, glimmer misting, etc. etc. – it will be very experimental, adding layers until I’m happy with it.

I began by distressing the edges of the service sheet, front and back, inside and out, with Tea Dye Distress Ink. This showed up a few little creases in the card, but I don’t mind that – it adds to the vintage, distressed effect.

I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into the ghastly orange card (well, I suppose that would be one way to distress it!) – first step, distress with Vintage Photo Distress Ink, dabbing all over with an Inkylicious Ink Duster to give a nice mottled effect.

I repeated the process with Dusty Concord Distress Ink – since orange and purple are complimentary colours, when mixed, they form a shade of brown. To darken it further, I added some Black Soot Distress Ink. In each case, I used a dabbing, stibbling motion with the ink duster.

It’s starting to look a bit like leather now. Time for a bit of stencilling, I think.

I painted on a thin layer of the beige acrylic glaze left over from my Remembrance page in my art journal, laid a stencil over the top and spritzed it with water, and then blotted and wiped it off through the stencil.

After this, I painted some glaze on the un-stencilled parts, placed the stencil on top, spritzed with water, and wiped off, leaving the paint under the stencil. I blotted the whole lot off with damp kitchen paper and this is the result.

Now time for some Glimmer Mist and Perfect Pearls. I sprayed it lightly in patches with my DIY Glimmer Mist made from Wild Honey Distress Re-Inker and Perfect Pearl coloured Perfect Pearls which gave it a silvery metallic sheen – the Wild Honey didn’t show up much because it was already rather dark. I need to mix up some new DIY Glimmer Mist with a more bronzy Perfect Pearls, I think.

I dabbed at it randomly with my small Perfect Medium pad (clear embossing ink) and then brushed it lightly with dry Cappuccino Perfect Pearls and spritzed it with water, and rubbed it gently to soften any sharp edges. It now has a more generalised random pearlescent sheen which I think I am happy with.

I think this is definitely a background I’d like to use in my art journal – nice and grungey and dark, with subtle shades and shimmers. I think it needs some stamping or embellishment in dull gold or rust.

All the stamps I used are from Designs by Ryn. First of all I stamped it twice with her “Water Droplets” stamp from her Textures range (CM-T3), using black archival ink. Then I used two of her gorgeous moth stamps from her Butterflies and Moths range – the top one is “Luna” (CM-B2) and the bottom two are “Tsuki” (CM-B5), stamping with Versamark and heat embossing with copper embossing powder.

The piece was matted onto the distressed card base, and I picked out the tiny catch-lights on each water droplet with my white Uni-ball marker pen. To finish the piece, I painted the moths with Perfect Pearls from my palette: the top moth is done with Berry Twist, a simply gorgeous dichroic one which turns from purple to blue according to the light. The middle moth was painted with Mint, and the bottom one with Turquoise. All the moth bodies were painted with Plum, another dichroic one which alternates between purple and a slightly more turquoise-blue than Berry Twist. This is the finished card. Unbelievable that it started with that horrendous garish orange card! I’m so glad I didn’t throw it away.

 

Finally, a detail shot of the stamping and embossing.

WOYWW 176

It’s simply aaaages since I’ve been on WOYWW – thank you everyone who has contacted me recently to see how I was, and I’m grateful that I was missed! I was going to give it a miss for yet another week, but feeling well enough to be creative this afternoon, I thought I could sneak one in quickly – very near the end of the WOYWW list this time, but better late than never!

My hubby bought me a gorgeous little hand-made leather book full of blank pages made of hand-made paper the other day, and I’m making it into an art journal. You can see it here.

Today I started working on the first double-page spread. I had glued a piece of music onto the left-hand page and this afternoon I sprayed it all with some DIY glimmer mist and then stencilled some circles with distress ink. I have started doing the text, painting with white acrylic paint – I want to add a border and some flowers.

On the right-hand side of the photo you can see a little green butterfly – this was one that I’d sprayed with my Dylusions inks a while back and thought the colour went pretty well, and then I must make up some flattish flowers to embellish the page.

I shall be dedicating a blog post to this page once it’s finished, so watch this space!

The book is sitting on a sheet of heavy white card. I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Jennibellie’s book and start working on a white card background rather than directly onto my craft sheet, because the mess you make gradually builds up into a unique background – I may use different sheets for different colour schemes. (Jennibellie is one of my favourite artists online and one day I may do a post featuring this wonderful, enthusiastic young lady who never fails to inspire me – she is the Recycling Queen of Planet Earth lol!!)

I’ve missed you all. The past few weeks have been very tough for me, and will probably continue to be so for a while, as we deal with the problems of my elderly parents, which takes its toll on my health, but hey, I’d actually got something on my desk worth sharing with you this week, rather than it being the dumping ground it’s been of late!

Hope you have all had a great WOYWW, and that most of you won’t have completely forgotten me!!

Perfect Pearls–Preparing for Use

Now that I have got my lovely big selection of Perfect Pearls (still missing some colours but I’ve certainly got enough to be going on with for now), I needed to prepare them so I could use them with maximum versatility.

The first thing to do was to remove the barcode label from each pot, which acted as a seal. Why, oh why can’t they use peelable labels??!! What a nightmare peeling them off! They were very hard to remove and left a nasty sticky residue, which had to be wiped off with some Crafter’s Companion Stick Away sprayed onto a piece of kitchen paper. The whole thing took an inordinate amount of time… (There are some things I have endless patience for, but not this.)

That done, I took some scraps of black card and cut them to approximately 1.5 x 2 inches, and wrote the name of the individual colours on each one with my embossing pen, and then applied the respective Perfect Pearl with the soft brush designed for the purpose. When they were all done, I spritzed them with water to fix the powder (which activates the binding agent, which I am reliably informed is Gum Arabic).

The black card shows off the colours to their best advantage, applied in this way. Unfortunately the picture doesn’t do them justice – they are gorgeous and really glow with that metallic sheen that Perfect Pearls possess. Some of the colours, notably Plum, Kiwi and Berry Twist, are dichroic, and change colour as you turn them in the light – I think the powder is acting as a diffraction grating in the same way as butterfly wings and peacock feathers, whose colours are not due to pigment, but to the surface breaking up the light waves and diffracting them into rainbow colours. Beautiful!

Next step was to punch a small hole in the corner of each one and bind them as a little swatch book for future reference. I can move the “pages” around and bring out different ones to compare how they go together.

Next problem – where am I going to store all my new Perfect Pearls? Too many now, to go in the small drawer I used to use for them. For now, they’ve gone in a redundant cardboard box that became too small for what was in it before!

Now I was ready to create my Perfect Pearls Palette, following Christie’s excellent instructions on her blog.

This is going to make using my Perfect Pearls as watercolours so much easier! I decided on a layout, spreading out the pots of Perfect Pearls in order and making a plan. I deliberately left gaps for the colours not yet in my collection, should I want to add them later. I arranged them in groups of type and colour.

Next I designed a label to go inside the lid. For this, I used Serif PagePlus, my desktop publishing software. The circles are 1 inch in diameter, exactly the same size as the depressions in the palette.

The straight lines are cutting guides. The sheet had to be cut into four as the palette has four ridges across the inside of the lid and a single sheet would not lie flat. Christie used her Dymo label maker to create small transparent labels for each colour, but I do not have one of these, so I this was my solution. After cutting the sheet into the four sections, I rounded the corners and glued each one into its respective space, lining up the printed circles with the circular depressions in the palette, using a small dab of Pinflair gel glue in each corner. I have created labels for all the available colours of Perfect Pearls, although I do not yet have them all; if I want to add to my collection, the spaces are available for them. I have uploaded this template to my Skydrive, and this can be freely downloaded if anyone wants to follow this tutorial.

Printed on inkjet acetate which has a coating, they were glued inside the lid of the box with the coated (printed) side against the plastic of the lid, so that the printing is protected, and shows through the lid the right way round.

Here is the palette with the labels attached.

Here is the dry powder being mixed with water in the palette.

You can see that I’ve made a bit of a mess of this. Christie recommends putting quite a lot of powder in, and then adding the water, but after doing this for the first one, I found it much easier to put in a smaller amount, add some water, then some more powder, some more water, etc. until there was enough – mixing it was then a lot less messy. Also, I didn’t have a water dropper bottle like hers, so I thought I’d spritz it with water – biiiig mistake – DON’T do this!! The spray squirted the Perfect Pearls powder all over the place! (Hence the mess being even worse.) Eventually I found an eye dropper which worked perfectly. I also used my little plastic glue spatula which was ideal because it was flexible, and square at the end so it got right into the corners of the depressions in the palette. I used a plastic teaspoon to ladle the powder into the palette.

The completed palette being left to dry. (You can see that my technique improved as I progressed through the palette! Definitely less messy.)

Christie recommends leaving it to dry before attempting to clean up any mess, and then gently blowing or brushing away any powder. If any of the mess was wet, and stuck on, it can be cleaned away with a damp cotton bud (Q-tip).

When they are dry, these Perfect Pearls in the palette can be used as one would use a watercolour box, with a wet brush to pick up the colour. I intend using my water brushes (that I use to colour my zentangles with Derwent Inktense pencils) because it will be a lot more convenient than normal brushes, and I will be able to do it away from my ARTHaven.

The third way that I use Perfect Pearls is in the form of DIY Glimmer Mists – I did a tutorial about this way back when I first started, before I even had my ARTHaven, following a tutorial of Tim Holtz, mixing Perfect Pearls, Distress Re-Inkers and water in spritzing bottles – you can vary the combinations ad infinitum, very cheaply!

Perfect Pearls are an incredibly versatile medium. You can get an intense metallic or iridescent pearlised finish when they are applied in concentrated form with water, a softer look when applied dry with a soft brush onto stamped or hand-drawn images in Versamark and fixed by spritzing with water, or a subtle, pearlised effect by applying in spray form. They are something I would not be without in my arsenal, and I am delighted that I now have a much more comprehensive collection. I am particularly thrilled with those with dichroic properties.

I bought two of these palettes, and eventually I am going to make a similar palette of my alcohol inks – another idea I got from Christie. When creating the labels for the Perfect Pearls palette, I also saved a blank version of the template, so that I can insert the names of the different colours of alcohol ink. Watch this space!

 

P.S. Remember the other day that I posted about how I lost my Tim Holtz Design Ruler, and bought another (longer) ruler to replace it? Well, as per my prediction, my original one has turned up today! Typical… I found it lurking in my for-sale box of mixed media mirrors. Duh. Oh well, s’pose you can never have enough rulers…

Hand-Made Paper

Whenever I smoosh with my distress ink pads on my craft sheet, I either use a piece of scrap card to mop it up, and save these to make backgrounds with, or if I’m feeling lazy, I just mop it up with paper towels. I am careful to use separate sheets for different colour combinations, and decided when I had enough, I’d start making something with them as the blended colours are so gorgeous.

Tonight I made my first one. This is only two layers thick, and may need building up a bit from behind if it proves too delicate. I first took the sheet with the blue colours on it, and added a bit more distress ink, using all the blues, smooshed and spritzed with water on my craft sheet, so that no white remained. I then laid this out flat, carefully, as it was quite wet, and took another sheet, with mostly purples and bits of green, and again added more distress ink to ensure complete coverage.

This piece I tore into smaller pieces, and gently spread soft matt acrylic gel medium onto the backs, and laid them onto the background, adding more gel medium as I went. When it was covered, I coated the whole surface with the gel medium and sprinkled on some gilding flakes (variegated green, although that doesn’t show up much – they just look gold!) and gently flattened them onto the surface with a large soft paintbrush. I dried it to almost dry with my heat gun, leaving it to dry completely overnight.

I love the result! I think this could be used for different things, according to what you mounted it onto. You could use it to cover three dimensional objects, gradually building up the layers like papier mache. I’m certainly going to use it to cover those small papier mache boxes you can buy – they are so irregular that it’s hard to cover them with ordinary paper. This first sheet was just done to the size of a single sheet of paper towel, but you could build it up into as large a sheet as you wanted, and whatever shape, too.

You could add anything to add texture and interest – bits of thread, leaves, angelina fibres, anything really, covering each layer with gel medium.

You could also use a gloss or semi-gloss gel medium to give a more shiny surface if you wanted.

Watch this space as I make up more of this!

Indian Floral Motifs

Today I cut some floral motifs that I designed from my Indian floral border. I used some off-white cardstock that I bought at a craft show, and I have no idea what make or weight it is, but it appears to be medium weight. My sample cut worked well at Force 50 but as usual, the actual cut didn’t do so well, so next time I shall increase the force to 60. As it was, I had quite a few small pieces which needed help to get them out, and on more than one occasion, small pieces were lifted by the blade mid-cut and interfered with the cut – I paused Sheba and pulled them out. I am surprised this is still happening because I re-stickied my mat again today and the card was extremely well secured – so much so that I had to exercise caution when removing it, so that I didn’t damage my flowers. (I seem to go from one extreme to the other – very sticky, or not sticky enough – one day maybe I shall get the adhesion of my mat correct!)

However, back to my floral motifs. Each petal is taken from the design of the border, and I made two versions – one solid and one with separate petals, each having five petals. Here is a bitmap of the svg file I created (now on my Skydrive for free download – see sidebar).

As you can see, in this file there are three sizes of one design, and one of the other. Of course, you could make them any size you like, but I thought for the purposes of layering, these sizes might be good. You will notice that I have made a hole in the centre of each part. This is so you can use a brad to secure the flower pieces if you want.

Here they are immediately after cutting (and tidying up – which took a long time…) – I have coloured them with three colours of Distress Inks: Spun Sugar, Broken China and Dusty Concord, using my Inkylicious Ink Dusters, blending the colours at their junctions.

The colours I used were Spun Sugar, Broken China and Dusty Concord.

Next, I sprayed them with some of my DIY Glimmer Mist (the link to this will take you to one of my early Youtube Videos, made before I had my ARTHaven). It is made from water, with as much Distress Ink re-inker as you need to obtain the colour you require, and some Perfect Pearls in your chosen colour added, and the liquid shaken gently in a spray bottle before each use to ensure that the mica powder is suspended evenly in the liquid. You can make these in any colour combinations you like. In this case I used Spun Sugar with Perfect Pearl coloured Perfect Pearls (the silvery one).

As usual, it’s a bit difficult to see the shimmer, but they really are quite shimmery, believe me!

The next step was to paint the edges with Perfect Pearls. First I used Forever Velvet, and finished the edges with Heirloom Gold, mixing them on my non-stick craft sheet with a fine paintbrush and a little water.

I love Perfect Pearls! These mica powders are so versatile. They have a binding agent in them so if they are applied with water, they do not rub off when dry.

After this, I hand-embossed the flower pieces gently, with a large sized embossing tool, to curl up the petals somewhat.

Finally, I layered the large and small pieces with the divided petals, and decided to leave the other two pieces separate. I glued the two layers together with a spot of Scotch Extra-Sticky adhesive

The final step was to add some Stickles as embellishments. In the above photo, the Stickles are still wet. When they are dry, they will become flatter. The colours I used were Purple, Turquoise and Fruit Punch.

I think if I make up a border using these colours, I could use these flowers to make a very pretty card, or they could be used to embellish the lid of a box, with the border going around the sides.