Folded with Care

Oh, what a lot of fun was this class.  Lots of different information on using stencils in different ways.  I wanted to do more videos but this set of classes packs in sooo much I ‘d have a forever video to capture its essence.  Nicole Watt does an excellent job of teaching 7 different (plus) ways to use your stencils.

• Coloring Stencils
• Graphite shading
• Silhouette
• Layering
• Spotlight/watercoloring
• Alcohol inks
• Using up the scraps

I will show you a few examples of most of these techniques but I will be focusing on the alcohol inks for this post.  Just like Nicole, I LOVE alcohol inks.  The re-inkers from Altenew work really well in any manner you might use alcohol inks.

Working with the stencils can be a bit tricky and very messy.  Messy is part of the fun for me…some like to wear gloves but I have never found the alcohol inks to be that lasting that I felt I needed gloves.  It is always a good idea to work on top of covered surface or in a box, though, to protect your crafting space from getting too messy.  One of the major things of using alcohol inks is that you have very little control over the overall outcome, yet you can also get LOTS of backgrounds made quickly and easily and no two will be alike. Then you can use them either as backgrounds or die cut them for silhouettes or flowers or shapes or sentiments.

• 

In Nicole’s class she uses photo paper rather than Yupo paper.  She emphasizes that it should be a good quality photo paper – one where you touch the corner with your finger and it sticks a bit.  I, too, have a lot of photo paper and rarely print my own pictures anymore so this is an excellent way to use something you might already have on hand.

The process is this:

1.  Have all your supplies ready ahead of time and open next to your workspace –inks and a spray bottle of alcohol  (Nicole used 70% alcohol but I used 91%).
2. Inside a box lay your photo paper shiny side up.
3. Choose the stencil you would like to use and pit it on top of the photo paper
4. Add a few drops of ink – whatever color or colors you like
5. Spray with alcohol, if desired, to help move the inks around
6. Lift the stencil up and move your paper to an area to dry
7. There will still be a lot of ink on your stencil so put down another sheet of photo paper
8. Spray the stencil with alcohol and lay the stencil down on top of the paper, let it sit a minute then lift up and put aside the paper to dry
9. Chances are you can still repeat steps 7 and 8 multiple times, with the result of each getting lighter and sometimes giving a nice watercolor look.  This can create some very lovely tidbits which will give you many background options.

In my examples below I used Altenew Deep Iris, Sea Glass, Ocean Waves, and Dessert Night.

Here are two of the cards I made with these backgrounds:

Also, here are other examples of cards from a few of the other lessons in this set:

• 

•