Weekend at Ally Pally

This weekend I had a very enjoyable time demoing for LB Crafts at the Alexandra Palace Big Stamping and Scrapbooking show, North London. It only takes me about 40 mins to drive there from our East London location, so it is probably one of the closest shows to us.

Lin has lots of exciting things to demo on and with, so I was given abundant goodies such as glimmer mists and Glimmer Screens, Distress Inks, Ten Seconds Studio metal, the Cuttlebug, shrink plastic and lots of PaperArtsy stamps to play with too (of course).

In most of the samples I used the same basic background technique: smooch a pale distress ink DTP (usually Scattered Straw, and a secondary colour at the edges), then spray heavily with 2-3 glimmer mists. Dry.

Now you have a base on which you can use a Glimmer Screen. Position the screen (stencil) across a corner, and spray over it with a darker Glimmer mist. Blot with a paper towel, then remove the screen and dry.

Now add some background stamping. I love the new script mini MN44 it is very classic, and looks fab no matter what you stamp it on! I also used Squiggly Mini 15 (the bubbles), becasue with the bubbles you can punch through the holes, or colour the spots in with white gel pen, or add bling onto spot....or do all three!

On to this background I would either stamp and often emboss an image in black, or lay another image on top, like this green and blue sample.

I have noticed the sparkly mica in glimmer mist backgrounds often prevents dye ink images from stamping up as brightly as normal. One way to overcome this is to stamp your feature image(s) in black pigment ink, and then emboss with clear Embossing Powder. note the difference in black on this "partridge" sample. The script was stamped in archival Jet Black, then dried. "Percy" Partridge was stamped in Pitch Black Adirondack Pigment Ink, then embossed with Clear EP, as were the dragonflies in the other sample.

I also found that colouring these images with a wet paint brush dipped directly onto distress inks is a nice way to make the featured images pop on the background. Look at the dragonflies and Percy in some of these examples.

So what did I do to that red dragonfly? A few posts back I talked a bit about the texture technique i discovered using glossy accents and gold EP. So this time I put glossy accents on the red wings, sprinkled heavily with polysparkle EP, then heat set until the glossy accents fizzes, pops and crackles and finally sets hard. I rubbed over the texture with a tiny amount of Gold Acrylic Paint Dabber. The cool thing about this idea, is that if your ink is still wet from colouring the wings when you apply the glossy accents, the glossy accents will also become stained by the Distress Ink.

So the last phase of these creations is to add some embellishments. And this has quickly become my totally favourite part of the card because we now have so many flower stamps to choose from, and i keep finding more and more things to do with them.

1. Stamp flowers onto shrink plastic: clear, transcluscent, cream or canvas white. I sprayed the shrink with glimmer mists before shrinking, and added bling centres after shrinking!
2. Stamp flowers onto metal, either coloured metal, glimmer sprayed cream metal, alcohol inked metal or simply shiny metal! Use stazOn solvent ink as it dries fast, and won't smudge when you cut out the images.
3. Stamp flowers onto acetate.Again leave it clear, or colour with alcohol ink on the reverse side. try metallic pens on the reverse too.
4. Stamp flowers onto GrungeBoard. This flexible thick product becomes soft when heated, so its easy to shape the petals when the grunge is warm. They will hold their form as it cools. Grunge can be inked, painted, sprayed, so a family of grunge flowers is lots of fun!
5. Stamp flowers onto canvas. Ranger has a new product from Claudine Hellmuth. It's a sticky backed white canvas. You can ink, paint and spray with Glimmer Mist, and stamp flowers onto the canvas. Try sticking the stamped canvas onto scrapping paper. I love sticking the canvas onto metal, because then you can shape the leaves, you can also add texture to your metal-backed canvas flower by running it through a cuttlebug embossing folder! How cool is that!
6. Stamp flowers onto backgrounds you have specifically made to match the colours of your piece.

Now you have a cazillion flowers on all kinds of layers, and all kinds of sizes, you can have a ball layering them either onto each other, or using them individually.

All of these samples have been made using stamps from PaperArtsy's Squiggly Ink: Egg & Nog or Tops & Tails stamp plates. I hope this helps you with some ideas to get cracking on this year's Christmas Cards!

Enjoy your creativity, and try something new today!
Leandra