Oxide Outing
Hope you had a great 3 day weekend everyone! This weekend was rather productive for me. Most of the weekend we were outdoors in the yard playing with our son, planting in the garden, or cleaning up the back and front yard. It was such a nice weekend it was hard not to be outside!
I did get a chance to work at my craft table and play around with some of my Distress Oxide inks (which I love!). They're just so fun, flowy and bright! I decided I wanted to make a bunch of backgrounds I could stamp or emboss on, so the "smooshing" technique seemed to be the biggest bang for my buck.
I quickly cut several pieces of white cardstock to 4.25in x 5.5in and pulled out about a half a dozen inks:
- Picked Raspberry
- Lucky Clover
- Abandoned Coral
- Squeezed Lemonade
- Peacock Feathers
- Salty Ocean
- Seedless Preserves
Whenever I use the "smooshing" technique I usually pull out a large piece of stencil paper. I bought mine at Hobby Lobby for about $5 but you can use whatever you have on hand that in the end you can wipe off. I'd love one of those Tim Holtz glass mats for this but it's not really necessary.
All I did was smoosh a few colors on the stencil paper and spray the area with a spritz of water. Then I took a piece of cardstock and pounced it in the different colors. Once I liked how the colors were, I'd set it off to dry.
One thing I love about the Oxides are that if you don't like the colors the first time around you can layer them. I had one card I wasn't thrilled with at first. I used my heat gun to dry it quickly, then I re "pounced" color on in certain areas. I would work this way until I found a palette I liked.
One word of caution, be careful of colors getting too close together on the stencil paper, mixing too much and turning brown. I started to get that happening after about 2 cards, then I'd have to wipe off the color on the stencil and reapply ink.
Sometimes I would leave the background the way it was and other times I would add water droplets on to the ink. With Oxides, if you dry them and then spritz water on it, the ink reacts with the water and creates great texture!
Once the backgrounds were dry, I started to find sentiments that I felt went with each background. On the first card, I used a Maymay stamp set called All About You. Both the hearts and the sentiment come from the set and I stamped them with Seedless Preserves Oxide Ink. (That's another thing I love about the Oxides! Not only can you create backgrounds but you can use them to stamp with!)
Then I used solid purple Bazzil paper as a border and rather than making a frame, I offset the oxide paper. I corner rounded two of the oxide edges and only the bottom right of the purple border paper. I then glued it to the card base and finished off the card by using Glossy Accents on the large heart and "You", which I thought would make them stand out a little more and make them pop.
For the next card I embossed the words "Thank You" and butterflies from Honey Bee Stamps "Thanks" set. added some jewels from Honey Bee Stamps Unicorn jewels , corner rounded two of the corners of the background and attached it to a light green paper as a border.
The "You're Awesome" card I think turned out super fun for summer. I wasn't even planning on using a pineapple stamp but when I saw the colors on the background it just called out for for summer fun with a pineapple stamp from Fiskars and stamped with some Oxide Inks. The sentiment is from a set I picked up from Michaels last week on clearance for like $1.00! They're not photopolymer, like I prefer, but the sentiments were too good to pass up.
I corner rounded each of the oxide background, attached it to a yellow border paper and again added bling with Honey Bee Stamps Unicorn Jewels.
The last two cards are my absolute favorites! I love the Honey Bee Stamp set Zen Floral! I've been waiting to pick it up for several months and about 6 weeks ago they had an amazing sale so I just couldn't pass it up! Both of these last two cards use the floral border from that set and it's ah-mazing!
For the Thank You card, I again used Honey Bee Stamps "Thanks" set for the sentiment and butterfly and the floral border from the Zen Floral and stamped them in Versamark Ink. Then I used Ranger's white embossing powder and heated it with my heat tool. Once melted, I colored in the flowers with my Arteza markers and added it to light purple cardstock background. I finished it off with Honey Bee Stamps Unicorn jewels.
The Make it a Beautiful Day card just makes me smile! Same process as the Thank You card, only I used Ranger Gold Embossing powder on everything and chose not to color in the flowers. You can see I missed a little bit of stamping at the bottom of the card and it was totally user error in my Tim Holtz Stamping platform but I still think it's beautiful. Again, I used Honey Bee Stamps Unicorn jewels and then attached to a craft card base. Seriously, I can't wait to give this card out because it's just soo pretty!
Well, I hope you enjoyed reading about my Oxide Outing and decide to try your own "smooshing" technique! See you next time!