A Bright and Happy Hanukkah

Welcoming the Festival of Lights with a simple but elegant card featuring Michelle Ward's NYC Skyline Stencil and Concord and 9th's Seasonal Sayings stamp set from The Ink Pad. More details on TIP Blog today!

SOS430: On Trend: Slimline Cards

Slimline cards... (we used to call them Tall Cards, back in the day, lol) ...are the hottest thing at the moment, whether you make the "official" size of 3.5 x 8.5" or just a skinny version of an A2, we encourage you to try out this fun shape with us at Shopping Our Stash this fortnight! 

I made a full-sized Slimline because I found this gorgeous bass (I think...?!) in an ancient, falling apart garage sale book called, "The Wondrous World of Fishes" I made him a watery home using torn and distressed bits of leftover gelprints; added Eyelet Outlet Sequin bubbles and spelled out "Best Fishes" using ancient square alphabet stickers. (Since I started serious cardmaking --circa 1990ish-- I have probably made my brother, Bill, at least twenty versions of a "Best Fishes" card for his birthday; someday I will get tired of it, but that day did not arrive this year, lol!) A skinny-skinny mat of Idea-Ology silver metallic cardstock completes the design. This guy would've fit nicely in a storebought #10, but I decided to make a custom envelope, using an Ireland page from an old British road atlas, big letters from the dollar store and a sheet of Volkswagen stickers from Pipsticks!

Hop on over to SOS to see the Crew's super-inspiring Slimline Cards, then start planning what you will link up with us this fortnight!

Folded Fronts

The Collins Virtual Online Symposium was a very inspiring experience for all of us at The Ink Pad. There are loads of fabulous new products on order; but in the meantime, we're having fun exploring some of the ideas gleaned from the wonderful classes. Dare 2B Artzy showed off a card that had a really cool fold, so I just had to try my own version. The results are on The Ink Pad Blog this morning!

I used Altenew's Hennah Elements Stamps for my focal images, and nestled the fussy-cut flowers and leaves on stacked Postage Infinity Dies from Hero Arts. Both cards are A2s, and landscape oriented,so that they have their hinges on the lefthand side. This allowed me --before I began to embellish-- to SCORE and fold back a portion of the card fronts. So the card on top in the photo above has had it's front scored vertically at the 2.75" point, and folded back. The card on the bottom had it's front flap scored diagonally and folded back. It may be a bit hard to see what I'm saying in that picture, so here's one with the fronts standing open:

I stamped the flowers in WOW Clear Embossing Ink, embossed with Ranger Black Embossing Powder and colored them with Distress Oxide Inks in Chipped Sapphire, Peacock Feathers, Milled Lavender and Wilted Violet to match the grungy gel prints I used as colorblock panels. (By the way, that is one of my favorite gel printing tips: clean-up prints, uninteresting ghost prints, and failed photo image transfers are GREAT for backgrounds and diecutting!)

I hope you'll be inspired to try a new fold for your cards or art journal pages. And speaking of NEW, our website has a brand NEW section for all the freshest items, you should probably check that out! 

Lauren Bergold

loves making cards!

Make a Mess!

This fortnight's assignment at Shopping Our Stash is a fun one, providing you are dressed appropriately, lol. We want you to get out those fabulously messy stash items we all love: glitter, paint, pigment powders, liquid or spray or alcohol inks... so put on an apron and have some fun!

6" round gel plate: gel press; large rectangular plate: gelli arts; acrylic paints: dina wakley, golden, liquitex plus some junky craft paint for "clean up" prints; stencils: background flowers: folk art; dots: bo bunny; lace: tim holtz; leaf stencils: wendy vecchi, penny black, stencil girl; flower die: memory box; leaf die: dress my craft; ink for edges: ranger distress oxide; adhesives: xyron, elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine 

I like quite a few types of messy media: ColorBursts, of course, and my Dina Wakley Scribble Sticks and Gloss Sprays; but I had a specific person in mind for whom I wanted to make a birthday card, so I decided to go with gel printing! When Stephanie was here last year, she had a brilliant idea for re-stocking our nearly depleted stashes of beloved Basic Grey semi-solid-color papers, by essentially pulling prints that were mostly one color of paint, with a just little grungy residue from whatever the last color and.or pattern was. Since then, I've done the same thing with various paints and inks and it's become a go-to technique. My diecut poppies and leaves are made from a dark green and a pink + red version. Of course, once you've got the plate and paints out, you might as well rock the stencils too, so I've incorporated a print with every shade of green imaginable that used several stencils. I honestly didn't like it on it's own, but as a frame, it's pretty cool! The yellow circle with stenciled leaves is a leftover from a gel printing class I taught at Paper Anthology last year, in which we practiced adding multiple layers, on successive pulls, one stencil at a time.

Hop on over to SOS and check out the beautiful messes embraced by my DT sisters, then start plotting what you will make this time! ♥

Gloss Spray + Gel Plate

I couldn't resist showing off one more card made from the things I learned in Dina Wakley's awesome "Focus on Gloss Sprays" class. This one was made using Gloss Sprays on my 6" Gel Plate, with Michelle Ward's beautiful NYC Skyline Stencils and Masks, exclusive to The Ink Pad; all the info's on TIP Blog today. ♥

Scribble Stick Mandala Monday

Have you been watching Dina Wakley's Demo With Dina series on her Art of Dina Wakley FaceBook page? If not, you need to pencil in some time at 1pm Eastern on Tuesdays and Thursdays because not only is Dina a wonderful, inspiring teacher; she's very funny and entertaining. She is also a true friend and supporter of independent art stores, so each session she's added a feature called Store Spotlight. Can you guess who the featured store was this past Thursday, April 30th? Here's a hint: it was The Ink Pad! If you missed the live streaming session it's archived HERE. I recommend it, not just because it featured TIP (tho that was cool!); but also, Dina was making art with her Scribble Sticks, and I was so inspired that I immediately had to get mine out and have a play, using some of the tips and techniques Dina used in the demo.

 
In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that at the moment, The Ink Pad does not currently have any Scribble Sticks in stock. They're on order from Ranger, all three sets, including the third one which contains the metallic colors Dina used in the demo. On the plus side, at the moment, anything you buy from TIP that's backordered, will ship to you for free!

At the moment, I only own the first set of Dina Wakley Scribble Sticks, though I can tell you that five minutes into Dina's demonstration, I had already texted Anna to say I neeeeeeeeeeeded the rest, lol! But the limited palette did not stop me from having a blast. For my first experiment, I worked on plain Canson Watercolor Paper, and basically just tried different ways to lay down the color to blend the shades, to add and subtract water, etc. I found that a wet crayon lays down color that is much more blend-able, but also a bit sheer. Scribbling with a dry crayon and then going over with a wet brush will result in a much harder line, though you can still "pull" some of the pigment around. At the end of my play session, I couldn't resist adding what Dina calls The Pox... those awesome splatters that you get by getting a Scribble Stick thoroughly wet and flicking it at your paper! When the entire page was bone dry, I added details with a fine-tipped, black Pigma Micron pen. (This worked because I had blended my Scribble Stick pigment quite a bit, so it was pretty flat to the page. If you have beautiful lumps of pigment, you'll want to avoid using a pen with a "cloggable" nib; stick with a Stabilo Pencil, a Posca Paint Pen, or a fountain pen!)

My second page is entirely a fluke. I started drawing a mandala with the Scribble Sticks on vintage ledger paper and discovered almost immediately that it was not going to hold up to more than the most minimal contact with water. So I put it aside, let it dry, and basically just used it as a "test" page to try out colors of my Dina Wakley Media Heavy Body Acrylics; to see what the Gel Press Petite Butterfly from Sally Lynn MacDonald's Sweet Nature set would look like, stamped with  inside a circle; to see what Michelle Ward's Manhole Hex stamp would look like inside the butterfly, and so forth. But... as I worked away without any expectations... I found that I quite liked where it was going and instead of switching to a "real" piece I just kept going. I added the word, "fly" using a sponge dauber dipped in Dina's Evergreen HB Acrylic, with Stencil Girl's Vintage Typewriter Alphabet (Lowercase). Then Dina's Spaced Dots stencil with the even drier daubers that had a bit of blue or green paint on them. After the page was entirely and completely dry I decided to try one more experiment: rolling it into my vintage Royal typewriter and adding --in the more sparsely painted areas-- a quote I found online, "Flying starts on the ground. The more grounded you are, the higher you can fly".

As a matter of fact, I didn't plan to make my two pieces be two half circles that would fit together, but when I saw that it was serendiptiously happening, I confess that I made the most of it by limiting the palette (mostly Night, Turquoise, Sky and Lime); by echoing some of the same shapes and by trimming the two pieces so they would line up perfectly. I'm both surprised and pleased by the result!

I hope you'll check out Demo With Dina and then afterwards, that you'll be inspired to make some art of your very own! ♥