Six Flower Cards with AB {by Liesbeth Fidder-de Vos}

Hello everyone, Liesbeth here with you today for showing you the beauty of two PaperArtsy stamp sets by Alison Bomber. I'd also love to show you some fun ways to use Infusions

This time I chose this two beauties: The Apple Blossom, PaperArtsy EAB46 and the Coneflowers, PaperArtsy EAB49. Although they're not exactly the same style, I think they work together perfectly. Just look at all those beautiful flowers! 

I will also work with three summer colours of PaperArtsy Infusions Dye Stain: Are You Cerise, Slime and Sunset Beach

I decided to make a few pretty cards. After all, who wouldn't enjoy receiving a beautiful card filled with flowers? This is how I made them:

On a piece of smooth watercolor paper, I sprinkled just a little of three Infusions colors along the left side. After spritzing it with water, I let the colors blend together into a vibrant burst of color. While everything was still wet, I inked up the text stamp (EAB46) directly from the background and stamped it onto the right side. So instead of using an ink pad, you're actually using the card itself as your ink source

After letting the card dry well I stamped some fragments of the text and some flowers from Stamp set PaperArtsy EAB49 with Tsukineko StazOn - Jet Black. This ink stays deep black even if you use bleach, which I use a lot

And yesss , here comes the bleach. Infusions work really well with bleach; every color of Infusions bleaches differently, it is always a surprise. I  started to ,paint' the petals with a synthetic brush and watered down bleach. If it doesn't bleach enough, I use pure bleach, but first I give it a bit of time.

At the left side you can see I also stamped with bleach. Put a drop of bleach onto a craft sheet or big acrylic block, spread it out to a very thin layer and use it as an inkpad.... bleachpad ;-)

After the bleach was dry, this card was a bit to white, it needed a bit of colour so I painted the flowers lightly with watered down Infusions.

Being a firm believer in the 'more is more' philosophy, I couldn't stop there! I stamped a few more leaves around the edges in light green ink (Versafine Clair-Avocado) and finished the card with a beautiful sentiment in black.

It's not really a technique, but I just had to show you this. It's one of the other cards I made. When working with Infusions, little surprises often appear on your paper. In this case, a beautiful 'flower' suddenly emerged all by itself. It wasn't planned at all—it just happened naturally. I love moments like that!

A detail of the ,flower' on the finished card, love it!

Before showing you my six cards, I would love to tell something about other finishing touches I did

 

This beautiful Apple blossom stamp from EAB46 is the focal point on one of the cards and it needed to pop out a bit more, so I drew a shadow around it with charcoal pencil and smudged it out with my finger

In my opinion this card needed very strong. bright coloured flowers. I coloured them with a pink Ecoline marker.

Here I coloured the leaves at the right side after drying (stamp-in-Infusions-technique) with only water; the water automatically absorbs and spreads colour from the infusions.

Two pictures to show you the bleaching effects again. The light text in the background are stamped with bleach. It`s important to clean your stamp immediately after stamping with bleach

And...after mixing up both PaperArtsy stamp sets EAB46 and EAB49 and having lots of fun making the Infusions backgrounds I ended up with these six cards

The Summer card is the one I showed you step-by-step above

I extended the stem by drawing with a black fineliner

Springtime and Postcard.

I secretly used an extra stamp here (PaperArtsy EAB21)...because the text matches so perfectly. The small birds nest stamp is stamped with a dark red ink and masked before I stamped the flower

The shadowed apple blossom and the Imagine card with the strange Infusions flower :-)

It was such a joy to create with these wonderful PaperArtsy products once again. I absolutely love the endless possibilities of Infusions, and combined with the beautiful floral stamps designed by Alison Bomber, they made creating this blog post a real pleasure.

I hope I've been able to inspire you and perhaps given you some ideas to try for yourself. Have lots of fun creating, and I'll see you again next time. Thank you so much for stopping by and taking a look!

Liesbeth XX

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Valentine treat boxes with KC {by Martine Dubé}

Valentines Day is around the corner and I always like to make treat boxes with little cards to offer to friends and loved ones. I made some using Kate Crane's mini stamps, infusions and Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylics.

The supplies use to make this project are Kate Crane mini stamps  (KCM008, KCM021, KCM022, KCM023) along with some Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic in Snowflake, Cerise, Smoked Paprika and Pumice, I also use some infusions in the color You Are Cerise. The cardstock I use is the Smoothy white stamping card 240gms (SCA4) and watercolor paper.

I started with a light base of infusions in Are You Cerise so that by background is not too white and to start creating layers. To do that you need to apply the infusion and with a water bottle add a lot of water and dry with a heat gun. I did this step in both paper (smoothy card SCA4) and watercolor paper to see the difference in color and how the smooth card would react with a lot of water.

Make sure this first layer is dry before making the next one. You can see here that the color is brighter on the smoothy card and that it took water very well. I also iron my cardstock so it's flat when I start to make my print...yes I iron my cardstock!!!

Using the same color of infusions  you make your background print - here I made hearts using a round paint brush but you can make the print you want - you could also use a stencil.

 

To add texture to my print I splattered the left over infusion, again here it's better if your print is dry that way the print and the splatters don't mix together.

For more texture I use water down fresco paint (Snowflake) to do more splatter.

Finish with doodle on the hearts with a paint pen.

Here are my finish background ready to be die cut.

Time to create my tags to put on the boxes. First I stamped the images that I wanted  KCM008, KCM022, KCM023. I also used KCM021 to add texture to my tags.

 

I use freso paint (Cerise, Smoked Paprika, Pumice) to color my images and watercolor pencils to add shadows.

I cut my tags out of watercolor paper and did the same watered down infusion background, you could add some infusions splatters here but I forgot...OOPS!!! Then stamped some hearts in matching colors and some texts for textures.

I've fussy cut my images in order to put some dimension on my tags.

For dimension I use some foam tape on the back of my images and added some stripe washi tape to ground them on my tags.

I colored some seam binding in pink and orange to match.

The tags are ready to put on my treat boxes, and I used a piece of double sided adhesive to do so.

Die cut the boxes and glued them with liquid glue.

I always have fun making these littles boxes, I love giving them to my family and to my co-workers. I always try to put an image that match their personality.

 

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