Last Saturday I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to demo on the PaperArtsy stand at Ally Pally which was great fun. The customers were great and took such an interest in finding out more about the products. A while ago my friend, Pauline, had mentioned that Lesley Wharton had been on The Craft Channel for Chocolate Baroque promoting Brushos so I tuned in to see this lovely lady on one of her shows. She did a great technique where she sprinkled the Brushos onto tissue paper, spritzed it with water, then when it was dry she scrunched it up then tore it into tiny pieces, decoupaged it onto various surfaces such as a frame, and then highlighted the crinkles with embossing powder. I thought I would try this with PaperArtsy Infusions but keeping the tissue in one whole piece. The result is above, on the lid of one of those wonderful boxes you can get from the MDF man, Rob, at the shows (although I think he may not be coming anymore unless we send him some love?!). I think the colours I used were Are You Cerise, Royal Blood, Violet Storm, Black Knight, and Sunset Beach. I patted a Versamark Pad over it and around the lovely shaped edges and used a special dual toned sapphire embossing powder I bought years ago from Gill at the Stamp Man.
So I thought this would be a good technique to show at Ally Pally as it translates so well into the Infusions and I thought Treasure Gold would work well instead of embossing powder, and it works a treat. Pauline had given me a huge pile of wooden blocks some time ago when she took the rubber stamps off in the microwave. They are so useful although they need a bit of prepping. I gessoed them first so that the true colours showed up, and wrapped the tissue paper around them. Before I dried the spritzed tissue I plonked some cardstock down to pick up the excess and to use for stamping on and matching everything up.
You can see what the tissue looks like here. I think it's lush, but the customers were oohing and aahing when I added the treasure gold to highlight the crinkles. I only used brass but it would be fun to use different colours, maybe a sapphire like the box lid I did?
This is the moppy-uppy card. I stamped some of the gorgeous stamps from Lin Brown's new Eclectica ELB 29/30. These stamps are so lush!!! I found when I was using the Infusions to paint with that if I used gel medium instead of water, the colours were much more intense. I am new to Infusions, is this a known fact? Very nice anyway!
It's lots of very special people's birthdays this week - lovely Julie Ann, one of my other best friends, Elaine, my bro John, and our lovely David would have been 57. I decided to make some Autumn Leaves birthday cards and this one is for John as he won't look on here. I thought it would be suitable for the PaperArtsy Autumn Leaves challenge, and just right for a horticulturalist. I used the tissue as the background glued to some cardstock and the sentiment is from JoFY 26. I am entering the challenge which is here.
One final thing I was showing at Ally Pally. A couple of years ago, Anneke de Clerck, who I greatly admire, did a blog post for PaperArtsy which I adored, using little pieces of scrunched up tissue on this particular flower, a hollyhock I think, from JoFY 26. As you get lots of tiny scraps of coloured tissue left from the Infusions technique, I thought I would revisit it with this card. The background has been made with Crayola Slick Stix. Hope you like.
