Last week we had "The Beast From The East" weather front that brought lots of snow and wind & this week they are talking about "The Pest From The West"! Fortunately this time around it looks as though it is going to miss us over here in the Kingdom of Fife.
The snow from last week is almost gone, just the remnants of where it was piled up from path and road clearing & we can see the snowdrops and crocus in the garden again.
I've been staying warm indoors & been trying some crafty things I've been meaning to for a while now - been ages since I experimented with something messy! I've had Brusho colour powders for ages but not really done much with them so I dug them out and had a play - should have worn latex gloves! Got some backgrounds done and then decided to have a try at doing some resist techniques with them, faux bleach effect. Out came the embossing kit and some new stamps to try. Put the new stamp on to the stamp platform and started applying the Ranger Perfect Medium that I've had for a while but not used in ages - what a mess! As I am applying it the Perfect Medium sponge (or whatever it is) decided that it was now chewing gum and left lumps all over the stamp - not impressed and not the kind of messy crafting I had in mind when I started! Fortunately I had a different embossing pad and could use that instead. I ended up trying the faux bleach effect with the Brusho colours and also using my Distress Inks as watercolours with two of my new Woodware floral stamps; "Wiggly Stems" and "Tall Flowers". I used one of these efforts as the background to this weeks Freshly Made Sketches Challenge.
This background with the faux bleach effect was made using the Woodware "Wiggly Stems" and Distress Inks. I originally had the Crazy Bird stamp also with the faux bleach effect but it just look weird - sort of had that "You're not really going to make me wear that!" look my son gave me as a toddler when I bought him a hat with teddy ears on! I soon changed it to a normally stamped image instead. The bird was coloured with Promarkers, which I then went over with the blender pen to give the appearance of watercolour and to try and tone to match the Distress Ink.
and using faux bleach effect on the Bird Crazy bird, not one of my better ideas - maybe a finer detail powder would be better.
The Woodware "Tall Flowers" stamp using same technique with Distress Inks
This is one of the Brusho backgrounds I came up with. I had the stamp in mind when I was making this one so was trying to aim to get some of the colours in the areas I wanted to colour the flowers. It's an A5 piece of cardstock which was cut down for stamping once it was dry. Compared with the Distress Inks, the Brusho colours seemed much more vibrant and intense.
