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.

Card Factory–Die-Cut Cards

I’ve decided to go through my scrap boxes and old stash, and see if I can use up some stuff that I’ve had for ages. I found a couple of die-cut card blanks which I must have got when I first started, and never used – I’m not really into this sort of thing, but thought they should be put to good use after all this time. They were far too flat and boring, even though they had pearlised surfaces, so I decided lots of distressing was in order!

My first step was to make masks to cover the background of the embossed design visible through the aperture on each card. If you look closely at the right-hand side of the oval-aperture card in this picture, you can just see the embossed design – this is clearly visible on the green rectangular-aperture card underneath. I cut the masks from scrap paper.

For the first card (oval aperture) I cut two masks. Here, the smaller one is being used, inking the embossed design with Peacock Feathers Distress Ink (from the Spring limited edition set).

When I closed the card, there was still a white border around the inked oval, so I cut a small amount away from the mask and re-inked the shape, this time using Broken China Distress Ink. The Inkylicious Ink Duster wasn’t really getting into the recessed oval around the design, so I went over it again with a stencil brush.

I was able to add a shaded effect with the second colour which gave it some more dimension.

In this next photo, I am distressing the front and back of the oval aperture card, using Peacock Feathers Distress Ink and an Inkylicious Ink Duster. The beige card blank is much improved with the addition of a little dusting of turquoise. The surface is rather shiny, so it doesn’t show up as well as it might in the photo.

I repeated the process on the inside of the card, and softened the edges of the masked oval with a bit of distressing too – all with Peacock Feathers Distress Ink.

Here is the completed card. I chose the colour scheme to go with some floral embellishments from my stash. The leaf trail was cut with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine, also from my stash. It was the colour of the bling in the centre of the flowers that made me decide on the Peacock Feathers colour, and I think it goes quite well with the beige iridescent card blank.

On to the green rectangular card blank. I repeated the process as above, this time using a combination of Dried Marigold and Brushed Corduroy Distress Inks. I also painted some Perfect Pearls from my palette onto the embossed design, using Cappuccino, and then some Bisque, and I also added some little touches of these onto the embellishments to blend them in. The coppery leaves were from my stash – these had been cut with Sheba and hand-embossed, and coloured with metallic Perfect Pearls. The embellishments on both cards were stuck down with hot glue. Here is a picture of the completed rectangular-aperture card.

This is the inside.

Finally, a photo of the two finished cards together.

For once the pearlised finishes have come up quite well on the photos. I am pleased with how these two simple little cards have turned out. They are A5 folded to A6 size. I have deliberately not added any sentiments as these can be added when needed, and I didn’t want to limit myself to “Happy Birthday” if I wanted to say “Thank You”!

Yesterday, my Mum, bless her little cotton socks, told me that she’d still got several cards left from the set I made her last year, and she was thinking of giving them back to me!!!! (She hasn’t thought that she could send them next year…) So… it’s back to the drawing board as far as her Christmas present is concerned. I need to find out how many she’s got left, and suggest that I make her just a few more so she’s got enough for next year, and I am going to continue with the Card Factory anyway, because I need to build up my stash for the coming year. It will be an interesting exercise in Using What I’ve Got! (I am sure we could all do a bit of that…)

Zentangle with Perfect Pearls

Today I tried out my new Perfect Pearls Palette for the first time. I drew a zentangle ATC with a platypus, inspired by Aboriginal art – a stylised shape filled with pattern and surrounded by more pattern, but with zentangle.

I coloured it using my Inktense pencils, and then picked out certain elements with Perfect Pearls, using a water brush to pick up the colour from the palette.

For the platypus body, I used Kiwi, which is a dichroic colour, giving shades of green and brown. For the water weed I used Interference Green, and Mint, which actually look very similar on the pale blue background. I added some Perfect Gold around the frame.

As usual, the shimmer really doesn’t show up in the photo. I have attempted to show this with a detail shot, with the ATC held at an angle to the light:

This shows it up slightly, but it really doesn’t do it justice. If you turn the ATC in the light, it really is quite shimmery. I didn’t put Perfect Pearls all over the surface but just picked out certain details, which adds one more element to my zentangle art.

Palette for Alcohol Inks

Today, following on from my Perfect Pearls palette, I made up my second Tim Holtz Ink Palette for alcohol inks, according to Christie’s tutorial on her blog. I don’t have as many alcohol inks as I do Perfect Pearls, so I only made two labels instead of four. If I ever increase my collection, it will be a simple matter to redo the labels.

Most of my alcohol inks are made by Jacquard Pinata – I got these as a set, much cheaper than the Adirondack ones, but on reflection, I think I would have preferred to have got all Adirondack ones, because this is what most people are using, and also the bottles have a much finer nozzle. However, I am stuck with them for now, and they work just as well. On my labels, I have added a “P” and an “A” to indicate whether the colour is a Pinata or an Adirondack ink.

These are the labels. As before, the straight lines are cutting guides. For full details, please see my post on the Perfect Pearls palette.

Here is the palette complete. Some of the inks are still not quite dry – I put quite a bit in and it takes a long time to dry, but they should all be dry by tomorrow.

Before I can use them, I need to get an Adirondack Alcohol Ink Fillable Pen, which I am going to fill with the blending solution, so that I can pick up the colours from the palette. Christie shows how you can do quite detailed work in this way. When I first got my alcohol inks, I didn’t use them that much, because although I like the effect of the traditional method of application – a few drops onto the felt applicator, and then dabbing onto the surface – I have always wanted a more accurate method, so that I could paint individual areas separately. This technique, with the palette and fillable pen, seems to be the answer. Christie shows how to paint onto shrink plastic, and then shrink it down to make delightful little charms etc. My idea is to make some Christmas decorations for sale at our next craft fair in November.

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…

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!!!