Folded with Care

This next lesson deals with ink blending.  As beautiful as it is, there are so many ways to do it and tools to use that I wasn’t sure what direction I was going.  I settled on ink blending and watercoloring with the Altenew inks.  This was a totally new process for me and I thought I would give it up along the way but as many a great crafter has said…just keep working it and it will fall in place.

With all the many beautiful flowered stamps to choose from it took a while to decide on using the smallest double flowered stamp in the Altenew Pen Sketched Flowers stamp set. My plan was to emboss, ink blend then use the water with more ink.

Since I was going to use water, I cut my Canson XL watercolor paper to a 4.25” x 5.5” piece and put the smooth side up on my Misti Stamp Positioner.  I used the antistatic bag all over the card, Altenew Embossing Ink, and Altenew Pure White Embossing Powder.  I stamped and embossed a couple flowers at a time across the bottom and then up the right side of the card, heating with the Wagner heat tool, then adding then next flowers.  When satisfied with the flowers, I added two leaf stamps, one on the top right and one to fill in a space at the bottom left. 

Funny but at this point, the card told me it needed to be PINK – who knew cards talked?  I chose Frosty Pink ink to blend from the bottom and across the card at an angle.  It wasn’t quite as dark as I wanted to so I also blended in some Pink Diamond ink.  On the leaves and stems I blended in Frayed Leaf ink. 

Onto the watercoloring loose look…On my Tim Holtz media mat I put some Coral Berry, Forest Glades, and Maple Yellow inks.  I sprayed my card with water to activate the blending and sprayed the ink on the mat to make them like watercolor paints.  Using a medium watercolor brush, I added the Coral Berry to the flowers and the Forest Glades to the leaves.  I used the Maple Yellow for the centers of the flowers.  It was ok but still needed something more.  Again, using the Coral Berry on my brush I just flicked some dots of color over all of it.  (A couple other tips – when one spot looked like too much water, I would dab it with a paper towel and when it seemed over wet, I put my Wagner heat tool on it to dry the paper.)  I made sure to use the heat tool to completely dry everything before I went on.  I trimmed the card to 4” x 5.25”.

At this point I was very happy with the softness of the card, thinking it would make a good sympathy card.   I chose some coordinating light pink paper by Reflections cutting it to 8.5” x 5.5” then scoring the mid-point to make an A2 card base.  I chose the sentiment from the Heartfelt Sentiments stamp set and positioned it in the Misti, stamping it with Altenew Jet Black ink.  Foam strips on the back popped it up just a bit off the card base.  A few iridescent sequins were the final touch for a gorgeous sympathy card.