A Frugal Journey Through January Day 24

Hello again and welcome back to my frugal journey, I can't believe there is just one week left, how time flies.

It's been a very sunny and bright, if chilly week and I have really enjoyed my walk to work each day across parkland with the dappled sunlight through the trees. I have a bit of a thing about bare trees, they always present such interesting shapes and shadows, so today's post features one of my all time favourite tree stamps. It is by Inkadinkado, I have had mine for 8 or 9 years yet it's still in the current catalogue - and on my shelves - the mark of a really great stamp I think.

The other product which features in this project is also an old favourite, Ranger's Perfect Pearls. These are very shimmery mica powders with an inbuilt resin so you can seal them with a just a fine mist of water, mix them with water to create custom shimmery sprays, with less water to make shimmery glazes to apply with a wet brush, add lustre to your plain embossing powders in a ratio of 1:2, and of course use them with the clear embossing ink of your choice applied to the image with a dry brush. All round a hugely versatile, sadly often forgotten and very under-rated product which is available in open stock of over 40 colours at just £2.95 each.

Today I am going to share a quick step by step to using the unique properties of Perfect Pearls to create a faux reflection. You will need some dark coloured card, navy blue and chocolate brown work very well but I am going to be boring and use black. Cut your cardstock to twice the height of your stamp plus a little, and just narrower than the width of your stamp and you will also need that stalwart of all stampers, a scrap piece of copy paper with a torn edge.

 

Place your piece short end to the top on a piece of copier paper to protect your surface and hold your torn edge on your smaller piece of copier paper at right angles to your cardstock at roughly the halfway point whilst you cover the exposed piece of card entirely with your clear ink of choice, I used Versamark. Turn your piece of card top to bottom and inking your stamp with Versamark, stamp the image slightly overlapping your block of ink.

 

Take a small soft brush and apply a couple of colours of Perfect Pearl - I'm using blues, lilacs, greens, and Perfect Pearl itself which is silvery to create a frosty version of my autumnal reflection in the first photo - to the block of ink, and the stamped image, until all the ink has a good solid covering of powder, polishing the excess away with another soft brush.

 

Turn your piece of card so the block of ink is to the top and again inking with clear ink, stamp the image into the block of ink just above your earlier image (which is currently upside down)

 

turn it around again and hey presto you have a faux reflection.

 

You can use the properties of Perfect Pearls which allow you to use both the positive and negative of an image to build layers of one image, creating an illusion of depth

 

or by masking off areas with 'post-it notes' and using a mix of the two, which looks much more impressive, and difficult to achieve than it actually is.

 

That's it for today, thank you for joining me, I hope you enjoyed my frugal project and are sifting through your stamps of trees/landscapes/leaves/flowers etc to give this a go.

Back tomorrow with a very frugal and useful gift to make from just one 12x12 sheet of cardstock. Hope to see you then xx

 

 

 

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