I've not blogged for a few weeks so that's my justification for such a long post...
On a 'works trip' to Stitches trade show in Feb with Gwen, I was mesmerised watching Fran Seiford of Stampendous demoing her fabulous Fran-tage range - apparently it's Fran for, well, Fran and tage as in vinTAGE, and it's a range of gorgeous powders and flakes - textured embossing powder, crushed glass glitter, mica flakes, shaved ice, matt fragments - an array of loveliness! I managed to talk Gwen into buying a load of their products to stock in the shop (
The Stamp Pad) including some lovely stamps as well as the messy stuff! Anyway, Fran did me a sample to bring away and this is it:
She calls this sprinkling of lots of the products in a random way Encrusted Jewel Technique - basically you sprinkle on your embossing powders first then add other texture and colour in the form of the glitters, flakes etc and when you heat it (from below otherwise you get it up your nose!!!) the powder melts and the other bits are secured in the molten embossing powder - you don't use any ink or glue, just sprinkle it straight onto the card - this seemed wrong at first! I'm addicted and as we had a shelf full of the stuff at the shop, I thought it only polite to do something with it so I offered to run a workshop!
We did three sessions and these are the samples of the pieces we did:
A nice simple tag using the Stampendous Daffodil stamp embossed in the Shabby White embossing powder and Encrusted Jewel using Aged Taupe powder plus the bronze and green Crushed Glass Glitter. I coloured parts of the image with chalk.
This second one uses my favourite of their stamps - I think it's called Three Gifts:
I piled some other products onto this tag to create 'treasure' - including the mica flakes, shaved ice and fragments as well as the powders and glitters used on the Daffodil tag.
We then got a bit more advanced and used one of Fran's other techniques - coffee spritzing! This piece is based on a sample Fran does on a video she has on YouTube - we had the stamp in stock so I thought I'd have a go:
Same products but I did the background by spritzing the card with black coffee in a spray, then sprinkling instant coffee granules onto the wet patches and spritzing again - I dabbed off a little of the coffee then heated until the coffee bubbled and dried! The Encrusted Jewel part was done in exactly the same way as before. Once they'd tried out the technique a few times, I thought the workshop participants could do a finished piece so we did this canvas:
I was glad I'd prepped a sample a couple of days before I had the first session as I hadn't considered the thickness of this canvas board and the fact that I had to heat from below - it worked eventually but it took the best part of an hour and my wrist was aching a lot! The second attempt was done in the oven and it worked perfectly - remember to consider where the fan is if you do this in a fan oven as otherwise your oven will be wearing it!! I sprayed the ready gessoed canvas panel with three colours of Ranger Colour Wash and dried it with my heat tool (which all reacted with the gesso and went much paler - serendipity as the colours were much more vintage looking). I then stamped and roughly cut out the frame and placed it as a mask on the canvas to give an idea of where to sprinkle - I then did the sprinkling and put it in the oven at 140! Once the powders had melted and the canvas had cooled down, I finished off with the stamped and embossed frame, cameo, the stamped and embossed corners (using the flourish from the frame) and embossed the edges by versamarking and dipping each edge into a line of powder in the fold of a piece of paper. I hope you like my samples - all products including the stamps are available
here!
Enjoy the rest of the Easter Weekend. JulieD x
