Quadruple-Embossed Birthday Card

The second of two posts today.

After making my triple-embossed purple get-well card the other day, I thought I’d take this one one stage further and make it quadruple-embossed! This is a sort of embossing sampler: embossing with an embossing folder; embossing with a die; heat embossing, and finally, hand-embossing! I’m pretty much embossed out after that lot.

It is my aunt’s birthday on 28th September and I needed to get on with this before my next chemo session on Friday because after that I won’t feel like doing anything for a week to ten days.

I began in exactly the same way as with the previous triple-embossed card, with the same sized card base and matting and layering, and the same Cuttlebug embossing folder because this is the only one (except for a gearwheels one that wasn’t appropriate) that is wide enough for this size of card.

I inked the blank area with Spun Sugar distress ink, and heat-embossed the Cuttlebug-embossed part with clear embossing powder (this time I applied the Versamark with my brayer which worked better, and it was certainly improved by my remembering to use my anti-static bag this time!). I inked it using more Spun Sugar, using an Inkylicious Ink Duster, so that the clear embossing acted as a resist.

Then I began work on the embellishments. I had intended to stamp some flowers and cut them out, but my few flower stamps are all rather solid and don’t give much scope for colouring in, so I decided to draw some flowers. I outlined them in pencil first and then used a Ranger Brush Tip in its holder with my new Hickory Smoke distress ink. I love this new colour – a lovely soft grey which tones very well with the Wendy Vecchi archival ink pad called Watering Can.

After I had drawn them all with the Hickory Smoke, I coloured them in using two shades of pink coloured pencils, blending the colour with a paper stump.

After cutting out the flowers, I hand-embossed them with two sizes of ball-ended embossing tools onto a piece of fun foam.

Here are the flowers, all embossed and ready to go.

I could not stick them down until the end because the glue would still be wet. I moved on to stamping the sentiment on the front of the card, using said Wendy Vecchi archival ink in Watering Can. I used stamps from the Stampin’ Up set “Memorable Moments.” This is a lovely set because it can be used for anniversaries too, and comes with a set of numbers. I used my stamp lining up tool to get it in the right place.

Now time to start matting and layering. The first matt layer was done with Hickory Smoke distress ink and was 1/16 in larger than the card topper.

I found an excellent tip a while back for lining up the matt layers accurately – with such a small difference in size, the slightest inaccuracy would show. I ran my ATG glue gun over the back of the card topper and then went over the DS tape with a glue stick, which makes it slick and moveable for a short period, giving you the chance to get it just right.

The second matt layer, again 1/16 in larger than the previous one, was done with Forest Moss distress ink.

To complete the card assembly, I inked the edges of the card base with Spun Sugar distress ink and matted and layered the rest on top.

I then stamped the sentiment on the inside of the card, using the same Stampin’ Up stamps from the “Memorable Moments” set. I inked around the edges with Spun Sugar distress ink.

Now for the embellishments on the front of the card. I found some small leaf trails from my stash, that I’d cut with Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine, ages ago. I stuck them down with Crafter’s Companion Stick & Stay spray adhesive.

I stuck the flowers down with Pinflair gel glue. I always use a cocktail stick for this – I find it a lot easier to control than a syringe, and I find that if you put this glue in a syringe, it is not long before it dries out and sets, wasting glue and ruining a good syringe!

The final step was to add some holly Stickles (glitter glue) to the centre of each flower.

The completed card. Nice and pretty for an elderly lady, I think!

Left out on the desk overnight to give the Pinflair glue and the Stickles time to set.

Alcohol Ink Backgrounds and a Birthday Card

The first of two posts today.

I suddenly realised that it is my friend’s birthday tomorrow and I had no card made, and nothing left in my stash, so I pulled out all the stops to get one in the post tonight. I decided to take the opportunity of replenishing my card stash at the same time, and began by creating a collection of alcohol ink backgrounds. I shall be posting about the cards in due course.

Wanting to use recycled materials as much as possible, I found some A5 fliers about solar panels that we picked up at the County Show in the summer, prior to deciding which company to go with. They are plain white on the back, and quite shiny, so ideal for alcohol inks.

My collection of alcohol inks consists of some from Adirondack, including the four Mixatives (Gold, Silver, Copper and Pearl) and a set of Pinata alcohol inks. In the list of ingredients below, these will be indicated “A” and “P” accordingly. I cleared up the mess on my non-stick craft sheet with surgical spirit (rubbing alcohol) and kitchen paper. Horrible smell!

1. Clover, Stream and Pearl Mixative (all A):

2. Wild Plum (A), Sapphire Blue (P) and Gold Mixative (A):

3. Pitch Black (A), White (P) and Pearl Mixative (A):

4. Burro Brown and Sunbright Yellow and Lime Green (P) and Copper Mixative (A):

5. Chilli Pepper, Calabaza Orange and Sunbright Yellow (P) and Gold Mixative (A):

6. Wild Plum (A), White (P) and Pearl Mixative (A):

7. Burro Brown, Calabaza Orange, and a very little Sunbright Yellow (P), and Copper Mixative (A):

8. Sunbright Yellow and White (P), Wild Plum and Pearl Mixative (A); I also dropped a lot of Pearl Mixative onto the sheet at the end:

9. All the Mixatives (A): Gold, Silver, Copper and Pearl, with some Clear Extender (P):

10. Re-used felt applicator from #8 above, with the addition of some Clear Extender (P), and then plenty of Pearl Mixative (A) and White (P) dropped onto the sheet at the end. I added plenty of the white because the printing on the reverse was starting to show through a bit.

11. Re-used felt applicator from #6 above, with White and Clear Extender (P) and then Pearl Mixative (A) dropped onto the sheet at the end. I love these pale marbled-effect ones.

The whole collection of alcohol ink backgrounds. Quite a good collection to be going on with! Unfortunately, as usual, the shimmery and metallic effects don’t show up very well on the photos. I love those Mixatives, especially the pearl one.

Just before I finished, my hubby called me down to pay the builder who’s been working on our outhouse, and I admitted to feeling even more unsteady on my feet than usual – all those alcohol fumes had gone to my head and I felt distinctly woozy!! My hubby said to the builder, “There you are, you can charge what you like – in that state she’ll sign anything” lol lol!!! Until I stood up I hadn’t realised how much of the fumes I must have been breathing in! You definitely need adequate ventilation for this job, especially if you are doing a lot.

I think I’m feeling a bit hung over now…

Now for the birthday card. I chose the alcohol ink background #1 above, and a matching Core’dinations paper from the “Gemstones” range. This has been in my stash for years, along with some other Core’dinations papers, and I thought it high time I used them up. The “Gemstones” range has a lovely iridescent sheen to it, but it doesn’t respond very well to the usual treatments that work so well with these papers (sanding, tearing etc. to reveal the core) so I tend just to emboss it and leave it at that.

Being a skinflint and a cheapskate, I cut the middle out of the alcohol ink background layer so I wouldn’t waste any – you can waste acres of card over the years by not doing this, and covering it all up when matting and layering!! I embossed the Core’dinations sheet with the Stampin’ Up Mosaic Madness embossing folder, using my Cuttlebug, and attached some dark red rick-rack across the corner.

I chose some flowers that I’d made some time ago, out of my stash, and attached them with hot glue. Then I used the Stampin’ Up Mosaic Madness punch to punch out some shapes from the strip of alcohol ink background that I’d cut off the bottom, and stuck one of these down onto the embossed card, and the others onto some offcuts of Core’dinations paper (before embossing). There is a small piece of this inside the card as well. The punched out pieces had a line of Aged Mahogany distress ink added with the Ranger brush tip to give them a bit of definition. The “Happy Birthday” stamp was one I’ve had for years, and I have no idea where it came from or who manufactured it. I repeated the same stamp inside, and in both cases used Aged Mahogany distress ink to co-ordinate with the large flower and rick-rack. The smaller flowers were made from Penny Duncan’s Hibiscus cutting file. The base card was inked lightly with Peacock Feathers distress ink, and also on the back and inside, and I applied the same to the edges of the envelope. This card isn’t one of my best – I’m not entirely happy with the composition, but I was working under pressure to get it done in time and I finished with 10 minutes to spare before my hubby had to go out!

I’ll hope to do better with the others. Watch this space.

Bridget Larsen’s Winter Lurgie Buster

Thank you, Bridget, for sharing your recipe for this cold remedy recently.

Our neighbour has been going through a bit of a rough patch recently and I thought she needed cheering up. Last week I made her the turquoise birthday card I showed you on my blog. My hubby told me she’d got a cold on top of everything else, so I decided to make up some of Bridget’s Winter Lurgie Buster (my name for it!) and give her a jar. To make it more of an attractive gift I covered the top of the jar with some pretty fabric and made a tag for it.

To create the background for my tag, I took some pale yellow card and embossed it with a Fiskars Texture Plate (Honeycomb design). The Cuttlebug sandwich for these texture plates is as follows: A plate, texture plate (RS up), cardstock, tan embossing mat, C plate. It’s quite a tight fit but it goes through OK!

I took my Stampotique Large Bee stamp (I’d have preferred the Medium Bee but I don’t yet own this!) and stamped it using sepia archival ink, after which I fussy cut it out.

The honeycomb embossed card was inked with Spiced Marmalade distress ink and then fussy-cut around the edges, following the embossed hexagon shapes. I swiped the surface gently with a blending tool, using Vintage Photo distress ink, to define the honeycomb shapes. I also folded a small piece of card in half and inked it with the same coloured distress inks.

I cut a lemon shape from the same card, and inked it with some Wild Honey and Spiced Marmalade distress inks. Then I went on a texture hunt! I tried various things, and nothing gave me that nice dimply mottled lemony texture, until I found my garlic press in the kitchen, and thought that the hard plastic projections on the back might do the trick. With this garlic press, after pressing the garlic, you open it right back so that the plastic projections push the remaining garlic back inside the press. (Funny how much of my kitchen stuff seems to end up in my ARTHaven, isn’t it!)

Anyway, using my little hand-embossing tool, this seemed to do the trick.

Now time to make the leaf. I hand-cut a shape out of the same card and inked it using Evergreen Bough distress ink, and then hand-embossed it from the back, using my large embossing tool. Turning it over, I drew on the veins using a Ranger Cut ’n Dry nib in its holder, and Forest Moss distress ink, and embossed them from the front with a finer embossing tool. These fibre nibs are brilliant, because you can use them to draw with distress inks, and you really don’t need to buy the distress markers!

I wrote some text inside the tag, using a sepia permanent marker, and attached some baker’s twine to the top.

The finished tag. The lemon and leaf were attached with hot glue – quite a lot, to help maintain the embossed shapes. After inking it with Wild Honey distress ink, I stuck the bee down with Scotch quick dry adhesive.

The tag attached to the jar with the baker’s twine. I cut the fabric circle from some gorgeous cotton fabric in my stash, with nice small-sized sunflowers on it.

Hope it brings some comfort, physically and emotionally!

Paper Flower Factory

Now I’m a bit more up to date with things, and the ATC swap is almost complete, I can concentrate on making some flowers. Judy of Judy’s Fabrications is swapping flowers with me – to see what she gets up to, visit her blog and take a look at the amazing OTT fabric flowers she makes, with all their glorious colours and beady embellishments! Can’t wait to swap…

Anyway, I find I’ve got a lot of flower shapes already cut (mostly Penny Duncan flower shapes – thanks Penny) so I’ve decided to make some of these up, at the same time experimenting with my new Dylusions inks.

These are the flower pieces sorted – they were all jumbled up in the two small plastic jars you can see at the back of my desk. Most of them were cut from watercolour paper, and there’s some regular cardstock mixed in, but they seemed to stand up to the wet treatment they were about to endure!

The rows of flowers are the 5 pieces needed to make Penny’s roses. The piles at the front of the desk are a mixture of different flower and leaf shapes which I can colour and layer together if I want.

After they were coloured, I left them for a couple of days while I was doing other things. They were then ready to be hand-embossed. It’s useless trying to do this if they are not completely dry because they will disintegrate.

I have just done the leaves, and as with the flowers, I created some backgrounds while I was at it – some mediochre-ly successful leafy backgrounds which may come in for something – I shall probably cut them down.

Because I didn’t want to wait for the leaves to dry, I dried them with my heat gun, using one of my home-made spraying booths. This stopped them blowing all over the place! (Actually, I think the time has come to invest in one of those wonderful quiet diffusing heat guns that don’t blow everything everywhere!)

When they were dry, I drew veins onto them with Pine Needles Distress Ink, taking the colour from the ink pad with one of my new nibs in its holder.

Here are the leaves being embossed:

and completed.

I love the variegated colours of them! One or two have picked up a bit of the pink/purple inks that I hadn’t wiped off my mat, adding a bit more interest!

I’ve Been Norty…

…and indulged in a teeny weeny bit of online retail therapy! After months of turning a bright shade of green every time I saw what people were doing with the utterly mouthwatering Dylusions ink sprays (no, don’t worry, I haven’t been drinking them!) I have finally succumbed, and treated myself to the complete set of 12. They have all still got their seals on and I can’t wait to open them up and get started, but I’ve got things I’ve got to do this week (getting ready for our accountant’s appointment next week – I hadn’t even started till this afternoon… really, really boring stuff and I’d much rather be doing art!!) so they are going to have to wait a bit. Aren’t they just juicy-gorgeous?

When the parcel arrived, the inks were all taped together into a block, and wrapped with red tissue paper and tied with some gorgeous brown jute string (which of course I have kept!) and tied into the bow was this lovely little wooden heart charm! Such a nice touch.

I have also got a whole lot of new Perfect Pearls, including some of the Interference range. One slight problem is that the newer ones have the label on the top, whereas the older ones have it on the bottom. This means that every time I use them I’m going to have to look at them to make sure I don’t open them upside down… Perhaps the labels will be peelable and I can stick them all on the lids instead of the bottoms!

I had about 6 pots and have wanted to expand the range for a while now. What made me finally get down to it was this incredible tutorial from Christie – if you haven’t seen any of her work or tutorials, do visit her blog because it’s awesome.

I just had to get two of the Tim Holtz Ink Palettes to do this with – Christie has also done a palette with her alcohol inks, and I am going to do this too.

You then end up with a palette of colours which you can use like watercolours, with a wet brush (water for Perfect Pearls, alcohol blending solution for alcohol inks) and use both these materials with a lot more control, and no waste, and with a lot less effort too. I have often used Perfect Pearls as watercolours, dipping a wet brush into the pot and mixing the powder with water on my craft sheet, but sometimes you end up mixing up too much and wasting it, and it’s not always easy to get the consistency just right. With the palette, though, I think this is going to be a lot better. I think I may invest in the Adirondack Alcohol Ink Fillable Pen which might be easier to use and lose less blending solution through evaporation than just dipping a brush in. Much as I love the effect of alcohol inks on the applicator felt, I’ve often thought it would be nice to have a bit more control, and use them to paint with, and this seems to be the answer.

Since the craft show just over a week ago, I haven’t been able to find my Tim Holtz design ruler – for a whole week after the event I wasn’t doing anything in my ARTHaven anyway because I wasn’t well enough, but when I got back in there and was looking for it to trim off the edges of my ATCs, it seemed to have disappeared completely! I thought I might as well buy a new one rather than wasting any more time and energy searching… Anyway, I found “The Very Useful Ruler” by Woodware, which is going to be better because it’s 15 inches long instead of 12 (it’s difficult to cut a piece of 12 inch card with a ruler that’s exactly the same length) and it has centimetres as well as inches (not that I use metric that much). It has a steel edge like the Tim Holtz one, but it’s absolutely flat instead of being rounded, and I think this will make for more accurate cutting. It also has measuring from the centre outwards, to make centring stuff easier.

I haven’t tried it yet. No doubt now I’ve got this new ruler, my old one will turn up again!

I also treated myself to the Ranger nib holder to hold my recently acquired nibs – I’ve just started using these for drawing or writing with Distress Inks. In combination with my new palettes, I might use them for writing with Perfect Pearls and alcohol inks, too. I’ve got several clear plastic containers left over from camera films, and annoyingly, the nibs are just too long to fit in, so I’ve trimmed the back ends down so they now measure 1 3/4 inches instead of 2 inches – now I’ve got the holder, making them a little bit shorter doesn’t make that much difference, and they now fit perfectly in the little container. I’ve even kept the bits I cut off because I thought they might come in useful to add to a project sometime… (Never Throw Anything Away!!)

What fun I am going to have with all this new stash. Norty… but Oh So Nice!!!