DivaRed Sundae Club Yesterday.

Yesterday was our regular DivaRed Sunday craft club, which I named the Sundae club (well food is never far from my mind). Unfortunately Janet wasn't able to be with us yesterday as she had a family do go to. However, she was there in spirit because I bought a Gelli Plate at the Claritystamp East workshop on Saturday, having been introduced to it by Janet at our workshop last week. If you would like to have a look at the cards Janet did on Saturday they are on her blog Cards, Cats and Coffee (after you've looked here obviously!!)

The ladies at our Sundae club are all very experienced crafters and so the Gelli was perfect for them, I just showed them how to use it and left them to their own devices, and they came up with some amazing designs.

For anyone who doesn't know about a Gelli it is basically a thick sheet of clear jelly like stuff, and you blob acrylic paint on it,  spread the paint about and then take a print by putting a piece of card on top of the paint, then peeling it away. You can add textures and use masks and all sorts of clever things, but that is the basics.

This was my sample card. I was lucky enough to bag a tube of gold acrylic on Saturday, it is gorgeous and the card is much more shiny in reality. I used black, gold and red paint, and spread it with a brayer.  The butterflies are made from the first print and the background from the second. I did apply more paint before the second print, and I was quite generous with it which gave me the nice texture as you can see in the next photo.

So this shows the texture on the background, as I said I used quite a lot of paint to achieve this, and I would imagine that it might not work so well with paints of a thinner consistency. I also discovered that peeling the card off at different angles and speeds gives you different results (you are starting to see that I had fun aren't you?)
I was surprised that with the amount of texture here it was quite easy to stamp onto. I used a cherry blossom stamp inked with Versa Mark and embossed it with Lava Black Cosmic Shimmer powder, then coloured in the blossoms with a white Souffle pen.

This is a close up of the butterfly, it is a stamp from Stamp Addicts and I think it is called the Japanese Cloth Butterfly, I use it a lot because it is easy to layer up. Stamped and embossed with Lava Black again, and as I said I used the first print for the butterflies.I just did two layers

This was the design I made whilst I was showing the ladies how to use the Gelli. I was well out of my comfort zone with green, white and yellow, but just so I didn't feel too alien  I did add a bit of the gold! The swirls on the panel have been embossed with gold powder but it still looked as though it needed something so I added the ribbon and a bow, then matted it onto green card. The flowers were made from the spare Gelli print card and the second layer of the flowers was made from the leftover matting and layering cardstock, the gold flower centres are card candi. The flower stamps were a freebie from  a magazine.

This one I used red, yellow ochre and a brown paint (no gold on this one). Spread the paint with a brayer  very, very gently then dabbed away some of the pain with bubble wrap, and then put a mask down, brayered over it then removed it and took my print. The base card is a mucky blue colour, you can just see the original colour where the mask has removed some of the paint (you can use up all your horrible colour card stock on this). All I did was to trim the print and mat it onto brown and then gold. The flowers are peel offs from Dawn Bibby's collection which I stuck onto bits of spare card, then dotted with Sakura's neon pens, and layered up, but Sheena's flower stamps would do just as well, I was just being lazy as these were already made.

So what do I think of Gelli printing - I was so sceptical when I first saw it being done, but now I am totally hooked.
Messy? - Yes
Easy ?  - Yes
Expensive? A bit, but I think it is worth it
Fun?  Oh yes, yes, yes!

Hope you like the cards, and if you have ever wondered if you would like Gelli printing, I would suggest you give it a go.

A Happy Little Accident!

Now I am aware that there is not much that is brand new in the way of crafting techniques, but this is a new one on me! It all happened when I wanted to glaze a stamped image to look like a tile, and was too lazy to go and find my Versamark ink pad, so I used spray adhesive instead!  The result looked just as though the image had water sitting on top of it.  So today I spent a happy morning in my craft room playing around with various embossing powders, stamps and inks.  Here are the results.  I have tried to get some really close up pictures, so in some shots you cant see the entire stamped image.

Firstly a piece of black card, covered with Versamark ink, clear UT (ultra thick embossing powder, if you haven't come across this it is larger grains that give a thicker coverage, think granulated sugar rather than icing!) This is obviously this is the traditional way to glaze with embossing powder.

Heated from the top, one coat of Crafty Notions diamond clear  UT. Nice and shiny but nothing out of the ordinary!

This one is the same card stock, but sprayed with Crafters Companion Stick and Spray, same UT applied and heated from the top.  It appears that the more heavy handed you are with the spray adhesive the bigger the "droplets" are, as you will see. I put quite a lot of adhesive on this one.
I also put a bit of gold gilding creams over the top of this

Then I moved onto a stamped image which I coloured in with Pro-Markers, and gave a lighter spray of adhesive before applying the UT, as you can see from the close up the droplets are much smaller.

I was really pleased with the result here, it genuinely does look like water sitting on top of the image.

Flushed with success, I thought I'd have another go and see what happened with a finer embossing powder, so out came the stamp, ink and pro-markers again, and this time I used a Wow sparkling crystal embossing powder, the effect was very pretty but not so pronounced.

My final experiment was to use the spray adhesive on white card and apply clear UT, again I heated from the top and then when it had cooled  I applied a distress ink over the whole thing, then wiped over it with a tissue, so the ink only coloured the exposed card and not the embossed areas, (I mention the cooling down thing because this is the second of my efforts, I forgot that UT takes longer to cool down than normal embossing!).

This is a close up of the last image. I really enjoyed playing around with this technique, and hope you like what you've seen, and perhaps you will have a go at this sometime.
I haven't tried the technique with other spray adhesives, but I can't see any reason why they shouldn't work just as well.



Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, and, until next time, Happy Crafting.

DivaRed Workshop on Saturday 4th May 2013

It is shaping up to be a really good bank holiday weekend, we had a fantastic workshop on Saturday, despite me having a sore back which made me walk like a duck! Lots of laughs, quite a lot of biscuits and some lovely cards. Thanks to Rosie who allowed me to post a picture of her inky fingers on Facebook - have a look she is very blue!

So amid all the giggling, this is what we made!

This one was made using a combination of free stamps which came with Creative Stamping magazine. It was a huge sheet of stamps, and I think I might have to do an entire blog of stuff I've made from it. The sand was a moment of inspiration in Sainsbury's. Whilst wandering round despondently (I hate shopping with a passion) I spied a packed of that gritted paper you put in the bottom of your pet budgie's cage "ah ha" I thought, a beach!
The shells are from the free stamps, the birds are a Lavinia stamp, and the background is my favourite stamp in the world, sea bubbles from Ryn.
So this how it was done.

• Stamp, colour in and cut out the beach huts and the shells. 
• Cut a square of white card, 6x6 inches, and using cut and dry foam or a blending tool, ink lightly with blue, leaving some areas lighter to resemble clouds.
• Mask off the sky area with a piece of copy paper to give you a straight horizon, and ink in layers of green and various blues to resemble waves, (mine is quite green, I used lettuce Adirondac, but then I was aiming for a North Sea effect!)
• Rip your budgie cage paper into a shape that looks a bit like sand with sea coming in onto it, and stick it to the base of your picture, then trim off the excess at the base of the card. (At this point it doesn't look very promising, but stick with it!)
• Stamp the birds in the sky, and stick the beach huts and shells in place, you will need to use  Pinflair glue gel to get them to stick to the gritted paper.
• Stamp the back ground paper (7.5 inches square) in blue ink with Ryns sea bubbles, and glitter the bubbles.
• Then mat and layer everything onto an 8x8 card. All done!

This is the slightly brighter one I made at the workshop using more of the free stamps and different birds. The background was stamped with Stream Adirondac ink, and personally I prefer it to the blue.

This next one is a card  I made to send to someone special, but I liked it so much I used it in the workshop and it will be on it's way to its new owner tomorrow.

It uses  a Sheena Douglass sentiment stamp, and Lindsay Mason's meadow flower stamps, available from Personal Impressions. 

You will also need Flitter glue, Yorkshire Dales gilding flakes, gold detail embossing powder, Versamark ink pad, various coloured small ink pads (I used Versacolour), a 7x7 inch card and card for matting and layering.

• Stamp and emboss your sentiment, trim it to required size and mat onto a piece of contrasting card.
• Cut a piece of white or cream card to 6 inches square, and make a very light pencil mark to indicate where the sentiment is going to be placed.
• Stamp a selection of the meadow flowers along the bottom edge of the card, going up to, but not over where the sentiment is going to be. Use various different colours to stamp the flowers and a couple of different greens for the stems.  Don't worry if the green ink gets onto the flower heads, it actually looks more natural.
• Next select a pretty shaped flower stamp and ink it up with Flitter glue, stamp it along the bottom edge of the card, don't stamp too many flowers with the glue, unusually for me, it is a case of less being more. !
• As soon as you finish stamping with the glue, put the stamp still attached to the acrylic block into a bowl of water, do not wait until you finish the card to do this, do it straight away!
• Next stamp a couple of butterflies with the flitter glue, and then stamp two more onto a piece of scrap card. Then put the stamps straight in the water.
• Sprinkle the gilding flakes over your card, rub in with the flat of your hand and then rub over with the Scoochie sponge, and brush off any surplus bits of flake (these can be used again so put them back into the container.).
• Cut out the two spare butterflies and 3D them onto the ones you have stamped onto the card.
• Mat and layer onto a 7x7 card in quarter inch increments .
• Place your sentiment as desired with 3D foam pads.
• Remove stamps and acrylic blocks from the water and dry them off.
• Go and have a cup of coffee!

If you are unfamiliar with using gilding flakes, go to IndigoBlu web site, or search You Tube for Kay Halliwell-Sutton and watch the instructional videos.

Once again I made a brighter version at the workshop. I can only stay subtle for so long!

The sentiment stamp on this one is from Stampin Up Sassy Sentiments, which are a beautiful font and it is embossed with Halloween powder from Wow.

I also added a couple dragonfly brads to this one.

The next two cards were Janet's designs, and you can find the instructions on her blog Cards, cats and coffee. Janet and I work together a lot, and it is well worth a look at her blog.

This Rosie (not the one with the inky fingers, the Clarity Stamp). I did vary this a bit, by using my own embossing folder and cutting it out rather than tearing, I'm not a big fan of tearing, always  love it on other peoples cards, but somehow it never looks right on mine!!

Janet forced me to use a Gelli plate, and I am so glad she did! I really enjoyed this one. I used my own flower stamps (freebies again, well I do have Scottish ancestry!) and put a few gold peel off dragonflies on the background, other than that I did what I was told for once!

Well I'm off now to finish knitting for Teeny Gotham, who should make an appearance into the world in the next couple of weeks. Hope you have enjoyed seeing these cards, next weekend is a real crafting bonanza, Claritystamp East on Saturday, and our regular monthly craft club on Sunday.

Enjoy the rest of the bank holiday. Hope to see you again soon.