Inky Fingers

I promised myself an inky day, trying out a couple of the new techniques that Tim Holtz showed in his Creative Chemistry class that I signed up for last week. I had bought some of his stencils when they first came out - I love the patterns, look at that burlap pattern, and the splatter one. I finally broke them out of their packets yesterday, and look how neat - they all clip together onto a jump ring, so even I (messy worker +++) won't toss them away by mistake....

I lined up all my distress inks ready for action - crikey! I have a lot...

 Who knew that distress inks are embossable? I didn't, but I dabbed ink through the stencil, then added clear embossing powder and heated...

I used ALL the stencils - never one to do things by half measures! The stamps are by Hero Arts, and I mounted the panel onto a plain cream card base....

Then I dug out the grunge board. Now this was a miracle in itself - I bought that stuff on sale in Tuesday Morning in the USA years ago and promptly lost it, then I found it but didn't know what to do with it, so I lost it again, now, just when I needed it, there it was, so I cut out some Sissix leaves and inked them. They look very glossy because I covered them (as Professor TH advised) with clear crackle glaze and I was waiting for them to dry.....

Now it's dry, and you can see the crackle - I don't think I got it quite right, but it looks okay....

So the leaves join the little boy in blue coloured image, waiting to make it onto a card, but even so, I had a lovely day, just messing around with inky fingers

Now I am going to chat about something that all my UK bloggy friends will have heard about endlessly, so they may want to sneak away now..... But for those of you overseas, those intrepid citizens of countries where you fight off rattlesnakes and deadly biting things on a daily basis, you may like to hear that there has been a huge amount of publicity here in the UK over some spiders that have sneakily found their way across the Channel into the UK, they are called Fake Widow spiders, and apparently, they can give you a nasty bite - not as nasty as their sisters called Black Widows, but a bite nevertheless. Now this has sent the country into a bit of a spin. We don't have many biting creatures here - just bees, wasps, horseflies and the occasional unruly dog..... We don't even have poisonous snakes, apart from one called an Adder, which is so rare that it's a protected species. So the thought of Fake Widows crawling onto your pillow and biting you has made the British stiff upper lip tremble a little, arachnophobia has become a national hobby. The newspapers are loving it of course, slow news day? Don't worry, we can wheel out the spiders again....

They even have experts telling us that we are killing innocent non-biting spiders, and this is not good for the environment...hilarious. Well, it's hilarious until the next time I see a spider in my bathtub, then I will turn into a screaming spider murderer - all those diagrams about how to recognize a Fake Widow will have been written in vain.....

Cheerio for now x