May 02, 2018 0 Comments
Hi Dare 2B Artzy friends! It’s Tonya from Krafty Enchantments.com. Hope you’re all enjoying some spring-like weather. Colorado’s been beautiful these past few days, in the 70’s so it’s been very nice to get out and enjoy the sunshine and smell the lilacs that are blooming.
I haven’t played with my alcohol inks for a while and I wanted to create a bright card for today’s post. In the past I’d applied alcohol inks to either the specialty papers from Ranger or Yupo, but I wanted to try something different. I wanted to show off the Dare 2B Artzy swirls stencil but in order to do that with the alcohol inks, I needed to use clear acetate for my alcohol inks. I cut a piece of heat-resistant acetate to 4 1/4 x 5 1/2.
I figured it would react the same way as it does on the specialty paper. For the most part it did and dries the same as it would with the specialty papers, however I did discover that since this is a clear background it’s best to use bright, bold colors as they will show up better on the acetate. I kept my palette pretty simple with just purple, bright pink and teal colors.
I started in one corner of the acetate and added a few drops of the various ink colors and then blew on them to mix them together. Next, I added some Blending Solution which toned down the colors a bit but allowed it to move more freely. I repeated the process until I was happy with the amount of color and blending. (I will apologize for the reflection in my card photos today, it’s nearly impossible to photograph the acetate and not have a reflection).
Since it was heat-resistant acetate, I did zap it really quickly with my heat tool. I didn’t want to dry the ink too much, just enough for it to be a bit tacky for my next step.
I’ve seen several bloggers re-use their scraps of foil on their alcohol inks. The tacky alcohol inks make a great surface for foiling. Like many crafters, I keep my foil scraps – they’re just too expensive to throw out. Plus it’s hard to throw out shiny/sparkly things, LOL! I had some light purple foil and some teal foil scraps. To add the foil to the alcohol ink, I carefully placed the foil over the tacky area of ink, shiny side up. Then I ran my fingers across the foil to burnish it. I rubbed the areas pretty firmly and then carefully peeled away the foil. You could also use a brayer for this step. The result was a gorgeous area of foil that looks like a vein of shiny color inside a geode. It’s such a cool technique.
When I’d finished playing with my alcohol inks, I cut a piece of violet-blue cardstock to an A2 size and placed my Dare 2B Artzy Swirl Stencil on top of the cardstock and held it in place on my craft mat with some washi tape. I wanted a sort of tone on tone look for the stencil so I used a Shaded Lilac Distress Oxide ink and pounced the ink onto the cardstock with a blending tool. I continued to pounce on ink until the entire piece of cardstock was covered. I carefully peeled back the washi tape and removed the cardstock and used my heat tool to dry the cardstock since Distress Inks stay wet and I didn’t want the ink to transfer onto my acetate.
For my flower, I stamped one of the flowers from Dare 2B Artzy’s Wishing Happiness stamp set onto a piece of Canson Watercolor paper with some black ink. I did have to stamp it a couple of times to get a crisp image. Next, I placed the water-color paper back into my MISTI and this time stamped it again with some Versamark ink over the black. I sprinkled on some clear embossing powder and heat set it. I like to do this step when I know that I’ll be water coloring my image.
To color the flower, I pulled out my Zig Clean Color Brush markers; I wanted to pull in a bit of the background colors so I used a light blue and purple for the center of the flower. I laid down some color and then added a bit of water to it. For the remainder of the flower I went with bright teal-green and yellow. I think it really makes the flower pop. I did let the color dry a bit and then layer in some more colors to make some areas a bit darker. When I’d finished and the flower was dry, I fussy cut it out.
The Wishing Happiness stamp set comes with some really pretty leaves that you can stamp as well, but I opted to use the Dare 2B Artzy Mini Leaf dies and cut two sets of leaves from some teal cardstock and some yellow-green cardstock. Not your traditional leaf colors, but I think they look so pretty with the other colors in the flower.
Finally I was ready to assemble my card. I started by gluing the die cut leaves in place behind the flower. Next I added some dimensional foam to the back of the flower to pop it up a bit. I added it to the front of the acetate. This gave me a place to hide my adhesive strips on the back of the acetate. Acetate does present some challenges when it comes to adhering it so it’s always good to be able to put the glue or adhesive tape in a place where it won’t be noticeable. It works well behind your focal point image.
I was then able to adhere the sponged background to the back of the acetate. I added both to a top folding card base from some teal cardstock cut to 4 3/8 x 5 3/4.
I wanted to keep my sentiment fairly minimal and I knew it would be hard to stamp onto the acetate directly so I decided to use a simple die cut “hi” sentiment using some alphabet dies. I did cut two sets and glued them together and then added them to my card front and added a small amount of Nuvo Glimmer Pen to the letters to make them sparkle. I also added some Glimmer pen to the flower center as well.
To finish off the card, I added a few iridescent sequins to the card front.
I think all the elements of this card came together perfectly. It’s a beautiful, colorful card with a bit of whimsy with the swirled background.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s card.
Hugs,
Tonya
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