New technique

Well, new to me, anyway. I was blog surfing yesterday evening & came upon something called the StazOn Cleaner Technique, by Annemiek v.d.G. on orientalstampart.com. It involved using StazOn cleaner to take some of the colour off glossy card, & the results looked good. I wanted to try it, but didn't have any glossy coloured card. I did have some encaustic art card, which is quite glossy, so I thought I'd try colouring it with Distress Inks & see if that worked. Needless to say, it didn't. The colour didn't shift one iota. So I tried dabbing with acetone, & that worked a little bit, but not enough to get the effect I was hoping for. Then I tried Isopropyl Alcohol. I use that as a dilutant for my alcohol inks. It's much cheaper than the proprietery blender and does exactly the same job. You order it in a huge bottle from the chemist, although first you have to convince them that you want it for a respectable purpose and not to go out and get drunk with.

Anyway, I digress. I surmised that the IA would work because it lightens the alcohol inks. It didn't work. Getting a bit fed up by then, I spilt some IA over the card I was working on. Grabbing a babywipe, I mopped up the spillage. The colour came off the card beautifully. Serendipity! Of course, I should have realised, alcohol inks being mixable with water. I'll plead tiredness (it was by then well past midnight) and the fact that I had been basing my thinking on StazOn. I guess if I'd used StazOn ink to colour the card, taking some off with the cleaner would have worked, but I only had black and brown StazOn to hand. One other thing I did like, though, was the effect of the Distress Ink on the encaustic art card. It came out much paler than on ordinary card.

So, having eventually found a method that worked, I set to & made a few backgrounds. Here's how I did the first one.

Step one was to wipe a Distress inkpad all over the card (I used Tea Dye for this one.)



Next I dabbed over with the scrunched up babywipe where I wanted to take off some colour. (Another digression here. I use the cheapest supermarket own brand, often called "value" type. They're what I clean my stamps with. I don't worry about whether or not they contain alcohol, though we're often advised to avoid it for stamping purposes. I also have a bottle of proprietery stamp cleaner made by Tsukineko, one of the leaders in inks etc. for stamping. The first ingredient in that is ethyl alcohol......! I've been stamping for about 20 years, still use the first stamp I ever bought and it's still as good as new.) Here's the result of the babywipe stage.



Finally I stamped all over with a Crafty Individuals stamp



The CI stamp reminds me of tree bark. A single Crafty Individuals tree over my babywipe background was all it needed, I thought, and not much else besides.



Here's the second card I made using the same method. Shabby Shutters Distress Ink to begin with, then overstamped with a flourish using Tattered Rose DI. The Old Fashioned Girl seemed to belong to it, so I gave her some colour by painting her with Distress Inks, & added a few flowers & a sheer ribbon as finishing touches. Both stamps by Crafty Individuals.