When I started the Celebration: Stencil Techniques class by Lauren Beard, I thought this would be the time to actually try out my layered stencils. It turns out that this was not one of the techniques covered in the class. In retrospect, I realized that this class probably was created before layered stencils became popular. That having been said, there were some interesting lessons in this class. I focused mainly on two techniques.
Creating Your Own Stencils With Dies
The first lesson in the class, this was probably my favorite technique. I looked through my stash of dies and settled on using Altenew's Delicate Mandala Die. I love this die, and thought it would be great to use it in a different way.
I made an ink spray by adding Lindy's Gang Magical Stormy Silver powder to a spray bottle filled with water. I placed the Mandala Die cut over a sheet of watercolor paper and sprayed all around it. Once it was dry, I cut out a 5x7 panel.
Since we were approaching the holiday season, I decided to use the Poinsettia and Pine stamp and die set from Altenew. I used dark red, brown and green crisp die inks to to stamp the outlines of each stamp in the set. Then I stamped them again with Versamark ink and embossed them with clear pearlescent embossing powder for a little extra sparkle. Finally I die cut the images and colored them with Altenew Alcohol Markers. Then it was time to play with all the pieces to create a layout.
I created the sentiment by cutting each letter twice from the tall alphabet die set and gluing them on top of each other. I matted the ensemble with a thin sparkly gray cardstock mat and a larger gray card stock mat embossed with a snowflakes embossing folder. This was the final result.
I still had the leftover piece of the stenciled mandala so I decided to make another card with it. The placement of the mandala was a little awkward and called for a different layout. I left out the poinsettia in this card and added some red gems to balance out the red berries.
I also changed the sentiment to Merry and Bright. Despite the awkward placement of the stencil, I actually like this card better than the first.
Stencil and Embossing Paste
A couple of the lessons in this class involved embossing paste, and this is where my struggles started. I wanted to use the alcohol inked rose that I had left over from a card I made for the ink blending class. Inspired by the layout of the cards in this class, I had this idea in mind of using a green background topped with a white square weave using embossing paste.
Upon learning that my embossing paste had gone dry, I first had to order some more and wait for it to arrive. Still playing with the sprays, I started with a green background that was pretty, but a little busy. I had hoped that the embossing paste would tone down the color, but the opposite turned out to be true. The opaque embossing paste still let plenty of the color underneath shine through.
I tried adding white pigment ink on top to make it more opaque, I tried going over the panel with a blending brush to even out the color. I tried the whole thing again with a green blended background and again with a white background with an embossing paste that was tinted green. I don't have any pictures because I threw out all my failed attempts in a moment of frustration.
The last panel I attempted was a little closer to something I actually liked, so I tried it one more time with a more neutral color. I tinted the embossing paste with Paper Bag crisp die ink. I had to do it in two parts, since the Square Weave Stencil was a little too small for my 5x7 card. I also decided to leave part of the panel white, to keep it from being so busy. I was much happier with this result.
I liked the layout of the cards Laurel made in her lessons, but mounting my panel on white was too much contrast for my taste. I decided to drag my paper bag ink cube across the paper to make it look like wood and I finally was happy with the results.
All that was left to do was to stamp out my sentiment. I was running low on thank you cards so I choose these sentiments from the Leaf Canopy stamp set in Deep Iris crisp die ink and embossed them with clear embossing powder. Here is the final result.
