It was my birthday last week so I treated myself to a few of his tools, like the ink blending tool and the edge distresser. 

I’m not sure what (or whether) I am going to stamp on top of these or embellish them or whether to leave them as examples…

For this one I used his ink blending tool and rubbed blue ink and burgundy ink on to the tag.  Then I sprinkled water over it, left it for about 10 seconds and then dried it with a heat gun.  The edges are distressed with the edge distresser.  I’ll probably rub some more ink into the edges to make them look more tattered.

I started off by painting over this tag entirely with black acrylic paint.  Then I stamped the tree stamp on to it with embossing ink and embossed them with clear embossing powder.  Then I dabbed a couple of different colours of acrylic paint all over and left it to dry.  Ulp.  What had I done?  But then I rubbed an eraser over it (Tim says a wet paper towel in his blog but he used his special paint dabbers so the paint might be different – I just used some Golden acrylics that I already have and it needed a bit more persuasion to reveal the trees underneath but the eraser did it just fine).    I do like the effect of this, the trees sort of poking out ghostily (is that a word?!!) from the background.

Here is a close up.  Good texture, eh?

For this one I rubbed an orange inkpad over the tag and then sprinkled clear embossing powder all over.   Then I flicked some of it off into the rubbish bin to make the speckled look.  Then I heated up the embossing powder and then rubbed a darker colour ink with the ink blending tool over the top.  Actually, Tim’s looks a lot more speckled than mine.  Obviously I need a bit of practice!

This one was meant to  be the same as the above but I used white embossing powder by mistake so I stamped an image over the top.  Nice texture again, though…

For this one I mixed up some distress reinker ink and some Pearl-ex powder with water in a misting bottle and sprayed it, using some stencils as a mask.  I think the image would be clearer if I’d used freezer paper or something which adheres to the paper but I quite like this effect.  Then I inked over the masked bits and did the trick with the water splotches again.  Then I painted one of the stars with clear crackle paint.  Fun!

For this one I was playing with green crackle paint which I then pounced blueish ink over to get in the cracks.  I had a play with my eyelets here too.

I’m sure some of these effects will find their way into my gocco printed images and the Moleskine journals…  And no doubt on to fabric too….

I was able to use each piece of transfer painted paper about three times, getting progressively fainter.  I still haven’t printed all the papers as I got diverted by some natural dyeing and printing (those photos are to come!) but here are the ones I have done.  I used a variety of fabrics – some synthetic napkins, lutradur, Evolon (a thin sythetic fabric that feels a bit like very soft felt) and polyester organza.

This is the piece of Evolon, with a variety of the papers printed on it.  Here are a few close ups:

This is the paper with the printed thermofax screen.

This was one of the papers made using the fabric crayons.

This one had a rubbing over a Lego layout plate and another rubbing over the circles stencil and a wash of dilute transfer paint over that.

This is the rubbing over the plastic grid.

Another screenprinted one.  I ironed the paper twice, once at a 90 degree angle to the other.

This is the lutradur printed with the paper rubbed over the letterpress type.  This could be layered over something as the lutradur is quite translucent.

Those seem to be the only ones I’ve done so far.  More to come!  But first, lots of natural dyed or painted stuff…

Sara Lechner from Austria, who blogs at The Fabric of Meditation, was visiting her daughter in North Wales, and she had a three hour train journey to see me!  Wales may be a small place, but it takes a long time to travel from north to south… And Sue Krekorian of The Magic Armchair Traveller came to join us.  We had a lovely time chatting, visiting a local cafe for lunch and wandering round Newport’s shops, chatting again… and having the obligatory photo in my studio!   DS2 kindly obliged and took this photo of the three of us:

While I was trying to upload that photo, Live Writer decided it wanted to upload another one and it’s such a nice one that I decided to let it stay…. This is one of the leaves of my avocado plant.  I thought the veins with the browning edges makes for a very interesting photo:

While we were in Stoke we saw this ferris wheel which is in the grounds of Trentham Gardens factory shopping village (I think it’s called something else but since it was Trentham Gardens when I grew up, that is what it will forever be in my mind).  I had my first summer job there, working as a cashier in the open air swimming pool.  Sadly, the said swimming pool was demolished some time ago…

I thought the centre of it would make a good Gocco screen…. (without Stoke City football club’s sponsorship medallion … or maybe even with it)

I wonder what 2009 will bring?  DH is going to India again later this month so I’m planning to do some gelatine plate monoprinting and some more screenprinting while he’s away.  So look out for lots of fabric photos.    I meant to do a blog post about 2008 and what had happened in it but time somehow flew away from me.    I think I will remember it for the Gocco and for getting involved in Etsy.  And for my two magazine articles in CTDG.    And for those of you who subscribe to Fibre and Stitch, look out for the January issue because I’ve got an article in there too!  Here’s a bit of a teaser…

Here is a piece with my crow stamped on it:

For the last few months, however, I’ve just had these pieces of plastic sitting there gradually getting used up, and hadn’t got round to shrinking them.  So last week I remedied that.  It was a bit of a learning curve – I started off with the heat gun but this didn’t give much control and the pieces ended up a bit knobbly and occasionally bits stuck to each other, so I did the rest in the oven.    Here they are all together:

I had punched holes in some of them to begin with – one, two, or lots.  And I rounded off most of the corners.    I did try punching shapes with a punch but that particular one stuck in the punch and cracked when I tried to release it. 

I like these of Rouen Cathedral and stamped angel… in reverse!  I didn’t realise that the shrink plastic was clear and the side you looked at was the reverse of the side you stamp.  But it doesn’t matter. 

I stamped this crow and then rubbed a yellow – yes, yellow – stamp pad around the outside.

And this one is my ‘Newport houses’ print, none the worse for being in reverse!  I did this with the heat gun as you can probably tell.  On reflection, I quite like the irregularities of shrinking with a heat gun.  The finished pieces, by the way, are about 1″x1.5″ so they did shrink a LOT – having started out at 4″x6″.  I might put one or two for sale on Etsy – they might make good embellishments for journals or small quilts or mixed media pieces.    What do you think?

There are a couple of blackbirds making a nest somewhere in the garden – I disturbed Mrs Blackbird with a clump of garden debris in her mouth and Mr Blackbird was hovering anxiously around. Plenty of debris in our garden – I don’t believe in neat and tidy gardens. Leave plenty for the wildlife. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

I then painted it with acrylic paint diluted with water and rubbed some of it off.

I then cut it out and cut out something that looks vaguely like clumps of leaves. These have Bondaweb on the back but I haven’t ironed them down yet – I need to do several more first. And trim the fabric at the top so it looks more like part of the tree…

I also heated the rocks – now they are standing out more from the fabric and are more visible.

I painted one with the dilute paint mixture and wiped it off so you can see the glitter underneath. It brings out the texture in the xpandaprint. (The black shadow is the paint on the fabric but this will be cut off eventually).