I’m looking forward to a plethora of brightly coloured cards over the next fortnight in response to the latest clean and simple card challenge from Less is More. It’s a colour challenge: ‘rainbow’. It’s been a long time since I featured a rainbow on a card and I couldn’t think of a stamp that was in my stash that had a rainbow on it. So, I dumped one possible interpretation of the theme and went with just the colours:
I’ve been playing around with some 15cm square mounted glass plates I had lying around the studio. I found some 3mm self-adhesive lead strip and used a template to stick it down. Rather than soldering the joins, I overlapped them and made sure they were well burnished. Then it was a matter of using some alcohol inks on the reverse of the glass to give the colour/’stained’ glass effect. I used isopropanol/rubbing alcohol to remove the alcohol ink from areas I didn’t want it.
Top tip: when cleaning fingerprints off with alcohol, remember not to wipe the reverse of the glass or some of your stain will rub off too…
The contemporary cross panel is available to purchase here.
My crafting mojo has wandered off, somewhat inconveniently for earning an income, but hey ho, it happens. I have been doing some ‘pottering’ in the studio though and here are a few altered art pieces I have managed to get made…
The last ‘proper’ day of the Creative Chemistry 103, and we were taught several techniques with alcohol inks on Yupo. For those not in the know, alcohol inks are dyes with, well, alcohol as the solvent – makes for fast drying heady crafting! And Yupo is a smooth plastic sheet of polypropylene suitable for all media, but particularly suited to media that play nicer when on non-porous surfaces. Lots of splatting, buffing, stamping, painting and puffing went into these. Great fun!
I’ve been playing with various options of putting colour onto metal – here are the results! I’ll be showing how to do them at the Manic Stamper Craft Club on Saturday.
The tags are first covered with metal foil tape (really thin foil – serves me right for going to the local poundstore!) and then I used a small embossing ball tool to emboss the outlines. Rub over the whole tag with black acrylic paint, and then wait for it to almost dry before rubbing off the paint from the tag – it should catch in the outlines. Add colour with acrylic inks (I used a paintbrush), Promarkers or alcohol inks (I used the Adirondack alcohol ink pen filled with blending solution to pick up dried alcohol inks from a palette). I love the aged look to the metal caused by the black acrylic, and the translucent colour from the Promarkers/alcohol inks. The acrylic inks are more luminous due to their opacity. By the way, alcohol seems to denature acrylic, so if your black coating doesn’t work out, wipe over with alcohol hand gel and try again!
And as a bonus, I’m publishing the forget-me-not doodle as a tangle pattern 🙂
