Trick or Treat . . . it's coming

There are some adorable images and collage sheets over at Inka Stamps that will make darling and even scary Halloween cards.

The card on the right incorporated some of Inka's rubber stamp images. The card on the left was created using a collage selection from Ten Two Studios and the pumpkins from Inka Stamps "Little Pumpkin" sheet.


Carolyn

Beeswax Lesson

For one of the workshop lessons for August using PAPER TRANSFORMED as our guide, we were to create a card or whatever using beeswax. I started out with a gold piece of mat board, painted on melted beeswax and adhered a thin sheet of rice patterned paper. Then I dipped my elements in melted wax and set them on top. I used my hot quilter's iron to help smooth out the uneven areas. When everythng had set up, I needed something extra so I added some black and silver mica chips to the top left-hand corner. NEVER DO THIS, because mica flakes scatter easily and I ended up with tiny specks on sections of the card not intended. The beeswax acted like a magnet.

I let the piece setup overnight and then added a thin coat, using my fingers, of Dorland's Wax Medium, and buffed the card. The cat is from a collage sheet from Ten Two Studios and crown from Inka Stamps.

Encaustic Wax Painting

WOW...it's been almost two weeks and I haven't posted to my blog nor taken the time to read some of my favorites so I have some catching up to do.

I've been working on some beeswax projects for the workshop over at Mixed Media Trends which should be finished and I will upload them this weekend. In keeping with the beeswax theme, Suze Weinberg had a video on her site this week showing us how to apply colored beeswax using her new stylus heat tool. She referred to the technique as painting with beeswax.

This card is my version.

However, I used two colors of encaustic wax using a tiny quilter's iron on a matte card embossed with a Cuttlebug folder. I applied the wax directly to the hot iron, just like Suze, and then painted the card hitting the high spots.

When I was happy with the application, I took a tissue and wiped the card to remove any excess wax and then added some Dorland's Wax Medium as the top coat and buffed the card. The Dorland's wax blended the colors moving some from the raised design to the flat area of the card for a really great effect.

As this is going to be a birthday card for a special person, I added a message strip created with one of the new border embossing plates.

After buffing, this matte card feels like silk and no color comes off on your hands.

I hope you will try it.

Tag with Shrink Plastic Embellishment

Members of the Design Team at Inka Stamps have been making some very creative tags so I jumped on the band wagon to create this one. I used another shrink piece from the Clown Cuties Collage Sheet (link in previous post). However, I used a red mat board for the tag base, an oval wood disk stamped with background images found at Inka Stamps. The window frame is also from Inka's Window Trends Collage Sheet.

More Shrink Plastic

A while back I requested a custom sheet of images from Inka Stamps printed on shrink plastic. This card used one of the clowns from the Clown Cuties sheet for an embellishment along with one of the window images from Inka's collage sheet, Window Trends. The round disk under the clown is a wood tag.

Removing Color - Gift Boxes

Julia Andrus has a new book, "Paper Transformed", that we are using for a workshop at Latest Trends Mixed Media. One of the July lessons suggested a Castaway pad to stamp the image and then remove the color using a heat tool.

However, I have found if you use your iron you get a much better result and the images are more pronounced.

For the purse, I used Inka's rubber stamps with the Castaway Pad and my iron to remove the color. I stamped the dragonfly a second time on velum with a bright pink Marvy pad and cut out the wings and attached them to the purse.

The tiny box was created in the same manner but the added butterflies were cut from some extra cardstock that was prepared for the box. The image was a design by Great Impressions.

Heat Transfers to MICA

A month or so back someone asked if you could transfer images to mica. That prompted an experiment and I used my heat transfer tool to transfer a couple of ephemera images from Inka Stamps to create a card and ATC. Because of the reflection, mica is difficult to photograph. For the card, I embossed a background card with a Cuttlebug template and then sanded off the top to make the diamonds pop. I added some sticker words and buttons to complete the card.

The darling kitten on the ATC was created in the same manner, but this time I used some spray webbing for the background along with a sticker for "wonder."

REVIEW MY MESSAGE DATED JUNE 12th that was the beginning of these cards.