Baublicious

Jenny has chosen an unusual but very pretty colour combination for us at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown this week.

It took a little while to think what I wanted to do for this, and a bit of serendipity played a part.

The background uses an embossing folder, I saw a youtube of someone using this technique, which I haven't done for ages, so decided to have a play.

I didn't have an ink that I would call aqua (there was a bit of a discussion at home about what colour aqua was, how much green is in it!). So I blended distress oxides, mostly peacock feathers, with a bit of tumbled glass and bundled sage sponged on. Cracked postacio may have been a better green to use, with hindsight. I added the ink to the deboss side of the folder, and spritzed the card with water before running through the embossing machine. I had a few iterations, this was the one I was happy with - although the photo is doesn't show the touch of green there is in real life!

(You can see I also used a spray over an embossed panel, but haven't made that into a card yet. The spray was also a blend, of distress reinker colours.)

I was going to do a gel plate paint print for the rose pink, but then on holiday last week I treated myself to some pink alcohol inks, and a gold mixative (amongst other crafty things!). So it seemed rude not to use them for this colour challenge.

I used these, again blending the pinks to get a shade I liked, to make a background sheet. I used yupo paper and coated card as bases, to compare.

I preferred the piece on coated paper, although that's not what I ended up using!

Onto these, I stamped my baubles in versamark ink, and heat embossed with a light gold powder. Of course, yupo paper is plastic so doesn't handle heat well - it curled up a lot!

However, once I'd fussy cut them out, I preferred them, they had more dimension, and the card ones looked flat in comparison. So those are the ones I used. And the rest have gone in an envelope to be used another time!

I arranged on the base, then stuck down with red linetape, to cope with the plastic surface, curl and embossed base.

At this point I realised I hadn't cut my base to size, it was slightly large (as is my usual practice, in case I don't like a bit or the edge pools or something). Fortunately, it was only slightly too large, because the baubles weren't coming off! I trimmed the base slightly, and made my card blank a bit bigger than usual, and it worked out.

I sponged peacock feathers around the edge, then added the bauble strings with a gel pen and ruler. The gold was a bit too yellow next to the embossing, so I used a little silver as well, while the ink was still wet, mixing them on the page to get a more subtle gold colour.

So, there you have my rose pink, aqua and gold card. Unfortunately the photo has distorted the colours a little, and the texture on the base and baubles looks a lot better in real life! But this is such a pretty colour combination, I hope you can get a feel for it.

 

 

To play along with this challenge, visit us at the 52CCT blog. You have a week, until Friday 20th August, to enter your card into our gallery.