Take a new look at felt!

This week my friend Tami over at Dapple Designs was the first guest challenge artist at the Stamp Shack. She posted a fun challenge to use felt in a papercrafting project and shared some examples of glittered felt she purchased by the sheet. As I checked out the local JoAnn's super store I found felt by the sheet that looks heat embossed. I had tons of fun creating a card with the animal skin embossed felt. For under 50cents a sheet this embossed felt was less expensive and provided more texture than some speciality printed paper. To give the felt some stability for cutting I ran it through the xyron and cut with the paper attached.


My 2nd project was creating an art journal which I plan to begin using on my cruise with Tim Holtz. Again I used the felt as a background this time a piece embossed with flourishes. I stamp a transparency with one of Tim's new ATC stamps and color with sharpies and added stickles on the back for some accents with bling. I love birds and am excited that many finally arrived in town today as part of their annual migration. Spring is on it's way! So I cut a bird from swirls grungeboard and painted it with Radiant Rain. The liquid H2O twinkle are wonderful to apply in this new product's dauber bottle and wow great sparkle too. Since my book was larger than the xyron I decide to glue the felt directly to the book cover and trimmed the edges after it dried. Next time you are in a craft store definitely look at the felt and check out what new choices you find. Thanks Tami for the encouragement to try something new!

A pocket full of posies

After watching the video tutorial on painting a transparency with alcohol inks and blending fluid in a aqua pen of course I had to give the new technique a try. But first I hooked my friend Jennifer into agreeing to play along with this experiment. We agree to reveal our results tonight.

Clear Paintables are transparencies that one buys with designs preprinted for easy coloring. Since they are not proportioned to fit cards I decided to try to make my own by stamping with Stazon ink and using the alcohol ink on the back side. I tried a couple different images until I found one with larger painting areas. Unfortunately I could not get the alcohol ink to build layers of colors which makes them so fantastic. I did use recycled plastic instead of transparencies so I have more work to do to see if that makes the difference. I did use some metallic pearl behind the background...I like that look a lot. I confess I had to use my Sharpie markers to fill in a few spots where the alcohol ink would not stay. This is a fun and fast technique--definately worth more experimentation!

Don't forget to check out Jennifer's work she will be posting tonight too!