I love to just “play” with my Tattered Angels products because you never know what you might discover while playing. One of the things I like to do is run my glimmer misted papers through my embossing machine—nothing new there, lots of people do this. I also love pooling the mists to make them blend. Well, last week while I was playing, I got a little over zealous with the spray and got my paper super wet. Instead of using an embossing folder, I decided to try embossing using my favorite swirl stamp. (Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous V3-1462). I really like the way it turned out, so I made a second attempt to show for my blog post this month.
I started with a 5.5” x 7.5” piece of Natural Bazzill cardstock, and saturated the front side with Mallard and Olive Vine Glimmer Mist, pooling the mist in the center. I dipped sequence waste into the pool of mist and pressed it all over the paper. Doing this makes a nice pattern on the paper but mainly it helps the mist seep evenly to the back side of the paper. In order to emboss using a stamp, the paper really needs to be quite wet to get the best impression. This is my second try at this, and I’ve learned that the paper wasn’t as saturated as the first time I did it as my image isn’t as deep as the first time I tried this. I also learned that all that pretty sequence waste pattern isn’t really visible anymore after doing the next step—but I wanted to show it, because you could always stop there and call it done. But of course, I had to keep going!
Because the paper is really damp, you have to be careful doing the next step which is to crumble the paper up to break down the fibers.
I used the crumpled paper to wipe up the excess mist on my mat. Wiping up like this, you get the excess glimmer onto the paper – especially the gold glimmer from the Olive Vine mist.
Open the paper gently and get the stamp you want to use, rubber side up.
Lay the wet paper on top of the stamp, and then lay a sheet of plastic wrap on top of the paper. The paper helps keep your fingers from sticking to the paper when doing the next step.
With the plastic wrap over the crumpled paper, press the paper into the stamp using the palm of your hand to really make an impression, followed by pressing down all areas with your finger tips to get into the grooves and around the edges of the image.
Remove the plastic wrap and the paper from the stamp and lay the paper on your mat. Cover the front side of the paper (the side that you pressed into with the stamp) with a layer of Chandelier Glam. This helps keep the embossed impression together. After I applied the glam, I used a heat gun to dry the paper, front and back. (The picture of the backside of the paper is on the right).
Once dry, I lightly rubbed vintage photo distress ink directly on the paper to hit the embossed highlights. I did this to both sides of the paper.
With the unglammed side of the paper facing up – completely cover the paper with chandelier glam. Since the distress ink is water based, adding glam at this point is going to make the ink move. To prevent contaminating your chandelier glam with vintage photo ink, instead of dipping your brush into the glam, pour the glam onto the paper (I use the cap for pouring) and spread the glam around the paper with your fan brush.
Immediately cover the wet glam with an acrylic sheet and press down to be sure contact is made. If you wanted, you could use a piece of chipboard instead, but I used an acrylic sheet because I loved the way the back side of the paper looks as well. The impression looks different and the coloring is lighter because the paper wasn’t sprayed directly. I pressed down around all the acrylic with my fingers, especially the edges, so that glam seeped out the edges. This will help assure the paper is sealed to the acrylic. Below is a picture of the backside with acrylic on top.
Let dry for about 10 minutes. While it was drying, I misted both sides of a 5×7 piece of chipboard with Mallard and Olive Vine to use as the back cover, and cut paper to put inside of the book.
After about 15 minutes, the acrylic was still wet but was dry enough for me to pick up and trim the paper close to the acrylic edges. When I was done trimming, I pressed all around the edges again.
Once the cover was pretty dry (about another 30 mins.), I used a crop-a-dile to punch holes in the covers and inside pages, and used a string of pearls for the book binding. I tied the pearls closed with narrow seam binding ribbon, and mini wired flowers. I added more ink to the embossed areas and the edges of the book using a combination of Vintage Photo and Black Soot Distress inks.
To decorate the cover, I misted two Prima flowers. One I misted with Mallard, and the second flower I misted a little Mallard on my mat and added a bit of Chandelier Glam to lighten the color, and then used my fan brush to paint it onto the second flower.
I made an interesting discovery for the leaves. I was going to cut individual leaves off some May Arts silver leaf ribbon and then mist them with Olive Vine. However, when I glanced around the table, I couldn’t find my scissors and didn’t feel like hunting for them again, so I thought if I pulled hard enough, I could just tear the leaf off. I couldn’t get it to tear off, but while pulling, I discovered that I could use the connecting string as a basting string. So I instead pulled the string and then pushed the leaf fabric upwards to make it look like a crinkled leaf. That’s probably not news to May Arts, but it was to me!
I misted the leaves lightly with Olive Vine mist. I then looked harder for my scissors and cut off the connecting string. Kinda nice when being lazy (and misplacing stuff) leads to a new discovery.
If you’d like to see my first attempt at this technique, you can see it on my blog, here. Because I was just “playing” when I tried this, I don’t know what colors I used. I just usually grab and light, a medium and a dark color—can’t really go wrong playing and combining glimmer mist colors. So take some time, and just play!
I hope you’ll join me on Wednesday, January 11th, when I do my next Tattered TV Educator Style show. Here’s the mini album we’ll be making where we combine Tattered Angels products with Prima products! Show starts at 6pm PST, I hope you’ll join me!
Christine Delgadillo
