Paper Towel Printing – Distress Inks

I’ve carried on playing with my newly discovered technique, and thought I ought to try Paper Towel Printing with distress inks. Here’s a step by step guide:

Firstly, place your sheet of paper towel onto a glass mat or other non-absorbent surface. Wet by spritzing with water.

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 Then I spritzed with homemade glimmer mist spray – good to have a background colour. I think it also helps the other colours keep in their place… This one is Peeled Paint with gold perfect pearls.

[To make your own mist – take one dropper full of reinker and add it to a mini-mister. Add a small scoop of perfect pearls. Fill with water to three quarters full, replace cap and shake vigorously. Spritz.]

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Drop on ink from your choice of distress ink reinker – this is Faded Jeans.

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Spritz each of those dots with water until they start bleeding.

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Repeat with more colours – this is Spiced Marmalade.I also added Dusty Concord.

Spritz with water.

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Start printing! Lay a tag/paper/cardstock/ATC on the towel and smooth down with your fingers. You may see water squeeze out of the edges at first – that’s what you’re after 🙂 You’ll also find the colours start to spread a little more into one another.

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All of this from one sheet? Yup – and they are all double-sided as well. It seems that the colours stay pretty much where you put them, so this would be great to carry a colour theme throughout a tag book, or art journal, or across several pieces of cardstock for scrapbooking or card making.

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And there was still some left over to do my art journal 🙂

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Close up of the tags – they’re a bit blotchy still as I didn’t wait to dry them before sharing this blog entry with you! Lots of texture on some, lovely watercolour effects. Love it!

Dickies – tangle pattern

Day Four of my daily tangle pattern week: and I’ve probably watched one too many episodes of ‘Bargain Hunt’… [For the non-UK residents, it’s an antique-buying and selling competition on day time TV, hosted by antiques expert Tim Wonnacott who is rarely seen without a dickie-bow]. This pattern also cries out for colour, but black and white patterns work just as well for me. The six I’ve shown are by no means an exhaustive list – try some of the other tangle patterns in each bow shape…

Tomorrow’s tangle pattern: oh yes, there’s another one – curly braces make a fifth comeback in the sequel of all sequels ‘CB5’.

Paper Daisies

Apparently hospitals don’t allow flowers to be brought in any more. Presumably greenfly are in danger of spreading MRSA around as they don’t sanitise between flowers? Any how – this lead to a request to make some paper flowers to take instead. And here they are. Using the large daisy punch, I sandwiched a whorl of florists wire between two cardstock daisies, stuck down with Glossy Accents. The centres were then layered with yellow six-petal flower punch, then a brown cardstock one inch sun punch before topping off with a disc of Liquid Pearls. Some petals were scored with small embossing tool, others were curved by pressing around a narrow cylinder. Rather pleased with the outcome, and so was my friend 🙂

Gelatin(e) Printing – test run

It’s been a busy morning – very creative vibes. I was reading about gelatin(e) printing yesterday afternoon, and set a gelatine gel plate overnight. I managed to get the sheet more or less intact out of the baking tray using a smidge of hot water round the base and sliding it onto a glass mat. And these are the results of my first play 🙂

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Paper Towel Printing – for art journals and backgrounds

I’ve been playing today 🙂  And one of the things I got playing with was a paper towel. I originally planned to dye it with acrylic paints/inks for decoupaging into my art journal. But one thing led to another, and before long, I’d ended up with what I think to be a totally novel technique – at least I haven’t seen it in all my hours browsing art journal techniques online. I’ll be calling it Paper Towel Printing, and this is the result:

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Raffia – tangle pattern

Day Two of my daily publication of seven new tangle patterns. ‘Raffia’ is, I guess, an adaptation of the numerous basket-weave based tangle patterns. It uses an offset repeat, which is a bit tricky at first, but drawing the base crosses speeds things up enormously! Once you’ve done those, fill in the ‘cords’ and the pattern is complete.

Tomorrow’s pattern: ‘Oranges and Lemons’.

Pink/Brown – Flower Power

I’m not sure what the rules are on multiple entries to the Passion for Promarkers challenges, but I’m submitting this one too! This is the second of my winnings from Some Odd Girl, Flower Kaylee. I found the combination of pink and brown a little tricky, but hopefully it’s come off.

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Blue/Brown – Singing in the Rain

Week #103 over at Passion for Promarkers: ‘blue/brown’ or ‘pink/brown’ colour theme. This is obviously an entry for the former category. The image is from my winnings for the anniversary challenge, Puddle Hopping Tia from Some Odd Girl. The background and raindrops are my own additions to make the card. I just couldn’t quite come up with the right sentiment!

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