Saturday Step by Step - Going Green

Hello Everyone! Glad you dropped in to Frilly and Funkie today. Pamellia here with my Saturday Step by Step. I have put together a card for a friend using some products that just arrived from The Funkie Junkie Boutique!!

I would like to share a couple of techniques with you today that probably aren't new to most of you, but I enjoy them and I get a lot of use out of them. I hope you will too.

The first technique involves creating a shadow by offsetting your stencil before applying texture paste. The second technique is one that I use it for three reasons. It involves covering your texture paste with embossing powder while it is still wet. The first reason I use this technique is for changing the colour of the paste, a good option when you don't have access to pre-coloured pastes, especially metallics. The second reason I use this technique is to create a resist, so you can use your ink sprays without changing the colour of the paste. The third reason for this technique is to keep your paste nice and white even when applied over top of dye ink backgrounds.

OK, on with the show.

I cut out two circles from white card stock. I spritzed some Shabby Shutters and Bundled Sage distress sprays on my acrylic block. I spritzed a little water and then pressed it on top of the paper to get a really cool splotchy pattern.This is a fairly common and simple technique that I do not use often enough!

Technique #1 - I refer to it as "Bumping" (Thanks Chris for the wonderful name). I used the Rays stencil from Tim Holtz and some Walnut Stain distress ink to apply the pattern. I placed the stencil back down on the pattern and lined it up and then "BUMPED" it just a little so it wasn't quite exact, before using some texture paste. It gives the texture paste pattern the appearance of having a shadow!!

Using Technique #2 - to keep your texture paste white. Very quickly, while the paste is still wet, cover it with white embossing powder and then set it aside to dry. As the paste dries, it will soak up the colours from the distress inks. Sort of unsightly, especially when making Christmas cards. So this is where the embossing powder comes in to play. After the paste is dry, heat up the powder and presto, your texture paste design is nice and white again!

For the main panel, I used the Tim Holtz Distress Damask set and Wendy Vecchi's Potting Soil ink to lay down a pattern. Then I applied some Wendy Vecchi crackle paste through Tim's Latticework stencil and quickly threw on some clear embossing powder.

Using Technique #2 - as an emboss resist. When the paste dries, heat and melt the powder. Now I can take my Shabby Shutters and Bundled Sage ink sprays and squirt to my heart's content...all you have to do is take a tissue and dab the stain off! The stain only colours the blank areas and the cracks in the paste! Isn't that fun! The advantage of this technique is being able to allow the sprays to pool in the recesses without changing the colour of the paste design, which is especially useful when using coloured paste.

I used some Ranger alcohol ink to colour one of the beads from Spellbinders new Gilded Rosary sets. These are gorgeous bead strands, which you can use as is, or pop a single bead off like I did here.

I coloured the Elizabeth Crafts dragonfly with three shades of Distress ink and then used some Glue N Seal Matte to coat the dragonfly with Distress Glitter Rock Candy. I cut out a second dragonfly in white and carefully cut it up the middle. Glueing each piece ever so slightly off to the side to make it look like the bottom dragonfly is bigger.

I threw in some layers of Kraft paper and white Prima doily die cuts to break up the green. I made some roses out of the Tattered Florals die, coloured them with Antique Linen and Walnut Stain distress inks and covered them with Rock Candy glitter. I added some foliage from the Garden Greens die, some pretty pearls, bronze corners and twine bow. It's not my friend's birthday so I used "Just Because" from the Chit Chat stickers as the sentiment.

Here are some cards I have made in the past using embossing powder and texture paste techniques. For this first one I used Ranger Copper embossing powder on white texture paste with the Prima Flourish stencil to get this wonderful effect.

For the second one I used Bronze embossing powder and then sprayed it with Lindy's Moonshadow Mist Buccaneer Bronze.

For this last one I took it one step further. I used clear embossing powder on an iridescent paste through a Prima Decor stencil, but then I dabbed it with my stippling brush before I heated it up, so there was little gaps. Then I sprayed with Moonshadow Mist. Some sank in and some rubbed off...a wonderful glistening don't you think.

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial . Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions and I would love to see any creations you make! There's still time to enter our current challenge "Bring on the Bling", where we are looking for your shabby or vintage creations showing us diamonds, pearls or even glitter! And we'll be back on Monday, March 16th to announce the winners of our last challenge, 'It's Time for a Vacation' so make sure to check in for that.

Thanks for stopping in!
Hugs, Pamellia :)

If you would like to try some of these wonderful products, they are available at The Funkie Junkie Boutique: