How does your garden grow and an inky tutorial

Good morning all you crafty Peeps, it's a bit of a heavy post this Saturday and I am so pleased that apart from this paragraph it was prepared well in advance as things are so slow going. New pills making me like a zombie and nothing really works too well, suffice to say I have not been able to do any stamping all week which is so b----y annoying as I had an Inkylicious delivery a few days ago. And very limited blogland activity, my apolgies as a few c&p comments are the best I can manage until my hands and arms get working properly again.

Saturday means it's time for our new theme at Allsorts, it's also my turn to share some work on the Stamping Sensations mid month post as well as my Penny Black mid month card. At Allsorts our host is Tracy and she has chosen 'How Does Your Garden Grow' as her them, which if course I love. Marianne Designs are our sponsor.

I used the Tattered Lace Hexagon dies and box sets, starting with the card I created a background with Broshos, Scarlet, Rose Red and Lime Green and let the wet ink run and decided to use it horizontally, then stamped Lavinia Dragon Pods in black archival, bleached out the flower heads and coloured in with purple Brusho's and covered with Glossy Accents. I also stamped a tiny Lavina Fairy onto one of the Pods. After making up the box and inserting a TL lattice panel I decorated with flowers and TL Ivy.

Just one more floral card from a play session I had with my new Altenew stamps, they are so much fun and the colour computations are endless, I used various shades of yellow to build up the blooms and black and grey for the leaves for a different look. The sentiment is a really old wood mounted one that I've had donkey's years, I remember doing a class using it at Ely at least ten years ago and all the ladies at the class were given one as part of the day's activities.

On to our mid month posts at Stamping Sensations and thankfully I did this a ready a few weeks ago. The current challenge for the Design Team is to share either a new technique or one that we enjoy. I have done a mini tutorial so have lifted that post to here and apologies that a couple of the cards may be familiar but they are relevant to the techniques I have used. The Butterfly cards are pretty much the same as one I blogged a few weeks ago, just different stamps and colours but I had some lovely comments and was asked how I created them so it seemed sensible to do a re-run.

There is nothing new about what I am going to share, but I am always reminded that new crafters are joining us and blogland all the time and it's easy to forget that we all started the same way keen to expand our crafting techniques so hope this might be of help to a few of you.

So it's some inkiness as that's what I enjoy most in my crafting activities and I am also rather keen on inspirational quotes so the two have come together on some of today's shares. 

I thought a few photos and a short tutorial might help and apologies to those of you well versed in all of this as it's not my intention to teach anyone to suck eggs ! 

For the Butterfly cards I used two colours of distress inks, although I used both ink pads and distress pens either or will work fine. In addition a black archival ink pad, an acrylic block for mixing the inks and a pipette......you can manage without this and use a wide paint brush instead but a pipette does make life easier. And of course your chosen stamps, I used Penny Black Butterflies, Visible Image quotes and an Inkylicious background.

My starting point is to dab the first colour of ink onto a small acrylic block and add small drops of water and mix so you have a little pool of colour, if using a pipette draw up the liquid and drop randomly holding the pipette 3- 4 inches above your piece of card, that allows the ink to splatter a bit as it lands which all adds to the random look. When doing this I concentrated on the areas to the left of the card as I knew this was where I wanted to stamp, then repeated with your second colour.

If using a brush load it with the diluted paint and flick the wooden stem/handle of the brush with your finger 3/4" above the piece of card. You will get random sized 'blobs' and if any look too wet or intense use a piece of kitchen roll to lift off some of the excess. You might find it helps to have a test run on a piece of scrap card so you can get confident with the process.

Next I took the background stamp and used a black distress marker to randomly ink just a section down the middle and repeat stamped it over the ink splatters. I stamped the sentiment next with black archival ink. The Butterflies are inked direct to stamp........doing this is easier with distress markers but still possible with ink pads, you just need to be careful were you ink, cut our the Butterfly, add wire antennas and fixed to the cards. Finally I matted and layered onto coordinating cardstock and an A5 card.

Here's another, almost the same just different colours and Butterfly stamp.

This card below was one on my Tattered Lace samples for the USA shows back in January but shows a different use of inks which is also great fun.

For this one you will need a selection of distress inks, an actylic block, pipette or wide paint brush (one that will hold plenty of water) and a drinking straw.

Start by stamping or in the case of the above card die cutting the image, inking with versamark and heat embossing with detail clear powder (as in the photo below). You need to do this to ensure your image is water resistant. 

Next follow the same procedure as the Butterfly card at the top of this post to create a watery pain mix, then pick up the colour with a pipette or brush and drip blobs onto the cardstock around your chosen image as below.........one colour at a time works best spacing them out to leave room for more colours in-between. Also you need to be fairly generous with the amount of inky liquid and use rather more than on the card at the top as with this technique you need sufficient liquid ink to move across the card.

Blowing each blob of colour with the drinking straw, gently encouraging the wet ink outwards towards the edges of the card, tilting the card if necessary. Keep repeating with your chosen colours. I used the same inks to add a little colour to the skull, I also finished the Butterfly you can see in the above photo in the same way.

And as my DT creation at the start of the challenge (above) was also inky I will briefly explain how I created the background for that one. 

I used Brushos on this one, sprinkling one colour at a time - here I used Ost Red, Violet and Lemon, spritzing generously with water so there is a visible pool of colour on the card, then use the same straw blowing and titling technique as the skull card. As quite a lot of water is used for this technique I tend to leave each color to dry for a few minutes before moving on to the next. I find this way there is less chance of the colours contaminating one another, you will probably get a little merging where the colours meet as I did with the red and purple but on the whole the colours stay put. 

With any of these techniques, if you find you have more liquid paint on your cardstock than you intended you can easily soak it up by dipping the corner of a piece of kitchen roll into the wet ink............I prefer not to lay the tissue onto the ink as it may well lift off more than you want, also it will take the intensity out of the colour. Of course if you want a paler finish then that is exactly how to achieve it.

And last but by no means least, my Penny Black mid month card using the fab Pop Pop Poppy image and a soft Brusho background.

Many thanks for taking a look and I hope I have encouraged you to get inky !!