The theme for this month's tag from Tim is layered stencils. Although I don't have any stencils, I used a chevron paper punch and a serif alphabet die from Stampin' Up! and applied crackle paint and ink through them as if they were stencils. The hexagons were stamped with versamark and embossed with clear embossing powder. The butterflies were stamped with StazOn so the ink would adhere to the embossing. The only non Stampin' Up! item is the typewriter letter from Levenger (no longer available).
I finally went back and completed the cards for Operation Write Home's sketch #183 and #184. Both cards feature the new chevron border punch from Stampin' Up while most of the other elements are scraps from other projects.
For this month's technique swap I used versamark to highlight one of the embossed chevron rows and then applied clear embossing powder. Then I stamped the shell background using the By the Seashore set and covered the image with a piece of vellum to tone down the dark color. The crab came from the same set and was cut out by hand.
The toughest part of this technique is finding just the right stamp. Ideally you want to use a stamp with a decent amount of surface area but you also want some negative space for the ink to penetrate between the embossed areas. I choose to use the new Papillon Potpourri butterfly stamp set from Stampin' Up! Below I included some step-by-step photos to go along with the previous directions.
I started by stamping solid circles onto whisper white cardstock using daffodil delight and calypso coral ink. Now that I'm looking at it on the screen, I'm thinking that perhaps a patterned paper might also work well for this.
Once I had my background stamped I ran a heat tool over the surface just to make sure the clear embossing powder wouldn't stick to the circles. I then stamped the butterfly images in versamark and applied clear embossing powder.
Next I used a sponge instead of a brayer to go over the embossed images with island indigo ink. I chose to use the sponge because I wanted to control the intensity of the ink so it wouldn't totally wash out the color of the circles.
Here is a closer view of the finished product. The texture on background paper is from the new chevron embossing folder.
