I have one corner of the binding of my quilt to finish but that will have to wait till tomorrow. Today, I am carrying on with my BIG CARD project. This is the Two of Diamonds.
A couple of interesting things today. I was intrigued by the effect of the metallic paint when combined with spray inks last week. I didn’t think the ink and surgical spirit dripping was what I wanted for this card, but I knew I wanted to lay more with the resist effect. I first embossed the strip of cardstock, using a dotty Sizzix folder.
After that, I painted the entire thing with metallic silver. I made sure to get the paint into the lower areas. when it was well and truly dry I sanded the embossing to reveal the white cardstock.
Adding both spritzed and dripped red ink, I smeared that over the whole strip. The spray ink saturated the raised dots that were revealed by the sanding, but was resisted by the metallic paint. I think it gave a cool effect.
Can you see how the dots are pretty vivid red and the background has a subtle sheen of silver?
I wanted to add a stamped image but I knew the raised areas were going to cause issues and perhaps prevent a clean impression. But by using a foam stamp and pigment ink, over a soft stamping base (my fave cork tile in a big plastic bag) the foam squished down into the depressions and gave a better image than I hoped for!
To finish off I used my newly powered Cricut (it only took about 6 months to get that new power cord!) and SCAL to cut the word, first in white, which I spritzed and smeared with the same red ink, then in black. I slightly off-set the letters to give a sort of shadow effect.
And that’s the Two done! Now only the Ace left and I can move on to playing with black – spades or clubs next? I haven’t decided yet!
My computer issues have expanded to include problems with our mail server, which lives usually quite happily in my parents basement in the USA. But this weekend it’s been acting up. The yesterday the internet went down, probably out UK ISP, which has been rubbish since a series of purchases lost Bulldog for us. And I am STILL having problems with my Mac insisting on verifying every font before it will load a blog for me, so one usual weekly task, compiling BlogBits for UKS, was taking me upwards of 4 HOURS to complete. That MAY get resolved if I upgrade to a slightly newer OS (one that keeps Appleworks working, but sorts the ATS Server issue with fonts) but DH tells me that is not as quick to do as I thought, especially if I want to dual-boot after the upgrade and boot both in the OLD OS as well as the new one, just in case there are any problems. So my life online is severely limited at the moment. I know, I know, I’m just moaning now. But what else can I do?
To you: Have a happy, and fully connected Monday!
scrappystickyinkymess 
19/03/2012 at 1:11 pm
What a great Ida love it looks fab