Old blog posts and when they spark an idea

I had a comment and a flurry of hits on an old post about adding gilding flakes to embossing paste. You can read it here. Sometimes, I forget something I blogged about years ago, and follow a link back to my own blog to see what I said. Old age is creeping in, but at least I recognize it was ME that said it, so it could be worse!

That idea totally sparked the idea to use something else I realized I have quite a lot of an nearly never use. Embossing powders. I have a drawer full of them:

And I found it interesting that some of them still have a price tag on them!

MJD – or MJ Designs, was owned by one of some number of brothers (three, I think, one owned Micheal’s, maybe still does!) and went out of business in 2003 – the price tag is dated 1997! At least one of the other pots still had the shrinkwrap on it. DOH! I painted the page with some watery acrylic paint in pinks and blues, pale colours made paler by watering them down and NOT colours I would usually pick. Hummm. seems I added the blue after the modelling paste and embossing. Whatever. Here is a process shot – I didn’t do a very good job of capturing every step this page.

I picked two colours, a Claret Tapestry and a Worn Lipstick Distress powder – they work well together, I think

I found it a challenge to know when they had embossed, given they don’t go SHINY per se, but you can just see the change in a ray of light:

THEN I added the pale blue and lots of water. The embossing resists the paint but it pools a bit in the craters and valleys of the embossing.

More water spray, some drippage, and un-filmed steps of background stamping…. Will do better.

I found a stamp with a quote I liked (stamp by Teesha, quote by Andy Warhol) and stamped then embossed it (in for a penny….) and dulled the extreme shine slightly by brushing matte gel medium over it, which worked better than I thought it might.

I stamped another Teesha image, and puled together some of the black embellishments from my vintage box of yesterday and eventually got to here:

I love the double circle stamp, which is the roll from the tape I used when wrapping Christmas presents! Quite glad I noticed it’s uniqueness before I binned it LOL! A close up:

The attribution to Warhol was on the stamp but when embossed it turned into a block of shiny black. Oh well. I will go back and add a date stamp – I have one, I used to do it on every page, but lately I have been forgetting. I really love this page, despite it being in colours I wouldn’t normally use. I am totally going to figure out how to pry off that slightly wonky don’t and re-set it! It’s buggin’ me.

30 hours to go, give or take. WOYWW tomorrow!

BIG CARDS – 6 of Diamonds

Amazed that I have stuck with this, frankly.  I have a very short attention span for long projects.

As usual, I began with Distress ink – Barn Door, Worn Lipstick and Spun Sugar.

I then took a big stamp – the brand is cover a Card and they are really BIG – and stamped it over the Distress ink.  I did dry the ink first, to be sure none of the embossing powder would cling to any of it.  Versamark ink and (stupidly) the WOW matte embossing powder.  Only stupid because I was going to iron it off anyway so some less precious powder would be better.

Having said THAT, I actually did like the look of the matte embossing on it’s own, so def. something to add to my arsenal of techniques.

I kinda wish I didn’t have so much of it because there are some instances where the Perfect Pearls, with the binder included in the mix when you buy it, would be better.  While I usually use Pearl-ex over Versamark, it does stick better to that sort of viscous ink and I wasn’t sure if the DI would hold it well enough.  And that was the next step – smudging the lightest colour in (Spun Sugar) over the whole thing then dusting on the Pearl-ex.

I then put the piece between the sheets of an old notebook that I use for this sort of thing and ironed off the embossing.  This did seem to set the Pearl-ex quite well, because even brisk scrubbing with a stiff paintbrush didn’t whisk it away.  Phew.

You can see how the mica powder clings to the inked areas but the Distress Ink background (from under the embossing) shows through.

I over-stamped again with Versamark and a favourite stamp, then embossed with Primary Apple Red (WOW again – man is the colour intense!)

Finally I added the word.

Done.  Love it.  Def. want to play more with the batik look.  I have ideas, but will save them for another day.

The whole thing really GLOWS with gold.

All the Diamonds are on white backgrounds.  I am thinking I might experiment with using BLACK card for the backgrounds for the Hearts.  I won’t e able to Distress ink the whole thing but  as this whole process is about testing techniques, it might be worth doing to see what I can come up with. Still unsure where to go with the black suits, but with luck I will come up with something I can follow through on!

Happy Monday!

Edited to add:  I just got an email from Scrap Scene.  Looks like they are doing something like WOYWW so I am adding the link. Another chance for inspiration, yippee!