Fragments ATCs

Made some ATCs today, on the theme of 'printed papers' - they had to have a background made of printed paper.  I stuck and old book page to my card backs, and sprayed with gunmetal and pearl colour mist sprays from Outside the Margins.  I added Golden black mica flakes around the edges, and used a diamonds stencil to apply Golden micaceous iron oxide down one side. I added some dots to add texture and dimension, using a pearl pen.

So far, so good.  I then made, and tried out, a whole series of embellishments on the ATCs, and none of them worked. I thought an image might work, but I have no long tall stamps, and none of the images in my collection are that shape either.

 So I stamped a swirly pattern down the right hand side to see if that would help. It looked better.  I tried a whole bunch of other things before settling on pieces of shrink plastic - fragments of images on one, fragments of text on another, and fragments of numbers on the last one. Works for me....

Doors ATCs

The theme for my monthly ATC swap was "doors and what's behind them."

Here is the front of the ATC I created:

The front of the ATC, the door itself, is made from scraps and odds and ends of sticks of friendly plastic.  I just cut all my scraps into smallish pieces and laid them all out onto a craft sheet, as close together as I could get them. I took another craft sheet and laid it on top, and ironed them until they melted together into a an A4 sheet approximately half the thickness of a friendly plastic stick .  I guess you could use a skillet for this if you have one, but your sheet would be thicker.  There were small gaps, so I added some more pieces of friendy plastic and ironed again. 

I then used a Spellbinders ATC die and my Wizard to cut ATCs form the sheet of friendly plastic. I rubbed the ATCs all over with olive bronze Treasure Gold, to hide most of the mixture of colours of friendly plastic. Each ATC was then laid onto the craft sheet, heated with a heat gun, and stamped into with the diamond patterned stamp (Invoke Arts).  I allowed the friendly plastic to completely cool before removing the stamp, and added more olive bronze Treasure Gold to give good coverage, then used renaissance gold Treasure Gold to highlight some of the raised areas. I punched a hole, then added a bead cap and brad to make the door handle.

Here is the what's behind the door:

The door is hinged with organza - the friendly plastic was carefully heated down one side and the organza was pressed into the warm plastic.  I then cut pieces of very thin wood sheet (maybe this is marquetry veneer?) to size, inked them to age them, and stamped them using the same stamp as the front of the door, before sticking them to the friendly plastic with red liner tape. The other part of the organza hinge was trapped between two layers of card stuck together with red liner tape.

The backgrounds of the inside were created using the layered paint technique as detailed in a previous blog post.

I cut this background into ATC sized pieces, stamped the words onto some paper from a very old book and glued them onto the background with gel medium.

Why 'Pieces of History'? Well, all the elements of the ATC are pieces of my history.  The friendly plastic was all left over from other projects.  The layered paint technique was learnt at Art & Soul during a fantastic trip to the USA back in 2007, which is part of my history.  It was painted onto a base of cardboard bpxes which used to contain one of my favourite smoothie ice lollies, and the book pages used for the words are from an old book which I have had for a long time, again part of my history.

Distress Ink tags

I made some tags for a swap. I was really pleased with them, so I thought I'd put a short tutorial here on how they were done.

I used these 3 colours of Distress Ink, plus Walnut Stain.

Firstly, I used the ink application tool with sponge to apply a layer of the lighter blue, and some of the rusty hinge. I added the darker blue round the edges.  I ran two tags through my Wizard in a Cuttlebug folder, then used a stencil on the other two - one has moulding paste applied, the other was inked through the stencil  - I used all 3 colours of ink for this.

I added more ink to the raised areas of the two embossed tags,mainly rusty hinge but also some of the darker blue,  and stamped the stencilled tag to add more 'texture'.

I inked up the tag with moulding paste, again using all three colours of ink.

I didn't neglect the backs of the tags, the embossed tags were just inked with the rusty hinge, the other tags were inked with all 3 colours, and stamped with a distressed paisley stamp in the darker blue.

Finally, I added depth and texture by applying Walnut Stain ink around the edges, and sprinkling with Detail Clear embossing powder, and heating with my heat gun.  I wanted the effect to be subtle, so I rubbed some of the embossing powder off with my finger before heating - this made it thinner in some parts than others, and also blurred the line where the embossing powder finishes.

I created some backgrounds using the tag card and inks, and stamped them with the lighter blue ink and the same textured background stamp as the tags, before stamping Leonardo images onto them, and adding more of all 3 inks with the applicator tool.  I stamped some words onto offcuts. I layered the images onto very thin layer of wood, which I had coloured using the same ink, then added to the tags with the words.  I only have 3 Leonardo stamps with the right size images for the tags, so the last tag has a panel with some stick on letters spelling Da Vinci.

  

Close up of the front of the assembled tag book.