STAINED GLASS

No I am not getting into another craft craze. I have enough of them already, thank you very much! But I did find this wonderful rubber stamp from The Artful Stamper in London, Ontario, Canada. It reminds me of a Tiffany stain glass work.

When I first found it I though of the Faux Cloisonne technique. Alas it was not a good stamp for that. I think the open spaces are too big. A smaller and more detailed stamp works better for that technique. Giving up on Faux Cloisonne I moved on to finding other ways to use this stamp.

It is a rather large stamp so I haven't come up with many different layouts for it. It pretty much takes up the whole 5 1/2 x 4 1/4 card front all on its own. So I've had to focus in on coloring and backgrounds for it. This has been fun in and of itself. Some of the techniques I have come up with don't show up will in my scans. I will try and describe those as best I can.

The first one is stamped on a piece of polished stone background paper that I made when I was playing around with that technique. I never came up with something I wanted to stamp on is so I just set it aside. I think this stamps works wonderfully with it. To give it some dimension like the stained glass has I stamped it in Black Craft ink and embossed it with clear embossing powder. I then cut the image out and mounted it on white mulberry paper. I don't like how the glue dots show through the mulberry paper so I used crystal effect and glued a rhinestone over them. I thought of using rhinestone brads to hold the paper down, but I don't like the brads showing on the inside of the card either. This is the least bold of the cards and I think I will make some more polished stone backgrounds and play with this more.

This next card is colored with a combination of Copic and Prisma markers. The image was stamped on plain white card stock with the Black Craft ink and also embossed. I found the raised edge of the embossing really helped me stay within the lines. I used my Canvas background stamp on the ruby red card stock with ruby red classic ink. Once again I cut out the oval image and mounted it. This tile though not totally centering the image so I had room for the sentiment.

The third and fourth cards are also colored with the markers. The difference being that on the third card the spaces that look white are actually cut out. There is an additional oval layer underneath the stamped image that is coated in Dazzling Diamonds for some added "bling" that shows through the cut out areas. The colored image is attached to the glitter layer using dimensionals so it appears to float over the backing. On this card I did use rhinestone brads in the corners since I had the additional layer of patterned paper they could go into and not show on the inside of the card itself.

The only thing unique about the forth card is that I laid out the card in a portrait rather than landscape fashion. Also the background is stamped using the direct ink pad to card stock method. You can't tell but there are actually about three different colors of ink used here.

I have one other image I am working with but haven't actually put it to a card yet. As in all the others I used Black craft ink and clear embossing powder so I would have the slightly raised edge. For this last one in the series though I have painted the image in with Twinkling H2O's. I like how it turned out with the little bit of shimmer. But I don't think the shimmer will show up in a scan. I have several other techniques I want to try, but they will have to wait a bit. I am now busily working on items to sell in out guild boutique so I can earn some fun money to get a few more toys......All of the cards are headed to the boutique.