Thursday, August 16, 2012

Need to get stuff done and stop playing with paper

The ATCs are taking to much time but I do enjoy making them.  Need to start back at making jewelry.  Now for a story my sister told me happened to her.

Several years ago we found out about an unknown cousin.  We won't go into the details.  But one day she was invited to my sister Pattie's home to meet her family.  They were excited to meet each other and learned that we all are allergic to strawberries and are talented musicians.  All the things that run in families.  Then our cousin ask Pattie if she would like to go out and buy paper with her!  It was at that point we knew that she was a member of the family!

The members of our family have a strange bond with paper that cannot be explained.  So I am enjoying playing with paper but I need to get back to other pursuits.

Today I have been making more ATCs and decorating envelopes to send out into the world.  I've had very little experience using rubber stamps so I used them to decorate the emvelopes and have been learning a lot.  I don't have many rubber stamp fonts so I tried a trick that I haven't used in a long time.  Using embossing powder on an inkjet printed page.  I discovered this one day when I was trying to print on a piece of gold card stock that had a slick finish.  Hours later the ink was still wet.  So the idea came to me that maybe I could stabilize the ink with embossing powder.  So I tried it and it work!  Now this trick only works on some paper.  Also I believe that not all printers ink work either.  The way to tell is when you print something and the ink take a moment to dry.  So I've played around and found that translucent vellum almost always works for this technique.  I make up a design on the computer.  Because the ink can dry so fast I put the box next to the printer and open the powder before hitting print on the computer.  You have to be fast and if I'm using a small vial of powder I just dump the whole thing on the paper.  Then I take the paper and heat set it.  If I'm fast enough this usually works.  Then I recover the embossing powder.  Once I printed out a image of a large vase with lots of flowers onto some translucent vellum.  The image was so large that I couldn't get enough clear embossing powder over the paper before some of the ink dried.  But when I heat set the paper the image half embossed was so pretty.  So even if you can't get the embossing powder over the image it can still look cool.

Well I have four more ATCs to make then I will be able to work on other stuff.

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