A Little Tutorial

I'm shocking myself today, I just realised that this is the second blog post this week.... I haven't managed that for a while!!! Anyways, a couple of people have asked me for some details about the tags in my previous post so I thought I would put together a little step by step thingy for you.

I have a tag, some Bondaweb and a piece of fabric. My fabric is a nice fine weave cotton so that it is easy to stamp on and also has a tiny print. Because I will be using translucent paints, you will still be able to see the print of the fabric which of course adds to the layering effect.

I like to use Bondaweb for adhering the fabric to the tag as it gives an instant bond. I don't have to wait for the glue to dry and there are definitely no lumpy, bumpy bits of glue under the fabric.

Simply trim the Bondaweb to the size of the tag, place it on the tag with the paper backing facing up, then iron.

If the backing paper doesn't peel away easily, just warm it up again with the iron and that should fix the issue for you.

Place the fabric, printed side up, on the glue side of the tag and iron until the fabric bonds to the card.

Trim away excess fabric.

To re-make the hole, I use the points of my scissors to pierce the fabric then use a paint brush to push through and open up the hole to the original size. This also pushes all the rough stuff to the back of the tag.

If you would like your fabric to have a bit of a frayed edge, now is the time to do it. Once the fabric has been painted, the fibres will stick together, making it quite tricky to separate them.

For the first layer, I selected a couple of bold stamps. The leaf trio is one of my favourites and is from ELB01 and the little daisy stamp is from ELB02. I used Snowflake Fresco Finish paint to stamp the images randomly, yet balanced over the tag. Make sure the paint is completely dry before moving on to the next layer.

 

My colour choice .......love this combo!

Even though all my colour choices are translucent paints, it is still important to water them down before painting on the fabric. The paints need to be a watery consistency to be able to work them into the fabric and blend the colours together. I always start with my lightest colour so this is Pumpkin Soup, brushed on in a few areas, leaving room for the other colours.

Next I added some Tangerine, making sure that I blended it with the Pumpkin Soup, I like a nice blended look not blocked areas of colour.

And last but not least, I filled in the gaps with my watered down Claret.

I chose a flower stencil, this one is by Prima and I used some masking tape to mask off the areas that I don't want which are very close to the bits that I do want.

I stencilled some Snowflake Fresco through the stencil, this will be the base coat for the next layer of paint. Because my next colours are  translucent, the white paint is needed for two reasons. First of all, it will make my translucent paint  appear opaque but it is also needed to show the true colour of the paint.

Reposition the stencil, then just move it a fraction in one direction so that we will get a little highlight around the flowers when the next colour is applied. I have used this Lynne Perrella technique a gazillion times but I do normally use it with a dark colour as my base layer to create a shadow, but I can only do this if I am using other opaque paints over the top.

I started colouring the flower heads with a layer of Tangerine followed by a bit of shading with Claret.

At this point I decided that the white paint was just a tad too stark so I watered down some Yellow Submarine Fresco and painted a wash over the whole tag. I also darkened the edges with a teeny tiny amount of Claret paint on a piece of Cut'n'Dry foam.

I stamped the quote from one of my new plates of stamps ELB06 (available in February) and a little bit of stencilling with my chicken wire stencil. I used Jet Black Archival ink for this.

At this point, I was thinking that I like it, but I don't love it. Nothing jumped out at me as being the top layer apart from the quote which I had stamped wonky, so that definitely jumped out at me!!!

I realised that I had left off one of my favourite techniques......to add script to some of the larger flowers!!!

I repositioned my stencil, grabbed a text stamp (MN61) and printed some text through the stencil.

I like it a lot more now. It just goes to show that the finishing touches do really make a difference.