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.