Experimenting with heat-gun and vellum.

You Make My Heart Flutter; Triple Layer Stamping on Vellum

I have continued playing with my new heat-gun and decided to try to make a triple layer stamping card with vellum, as I had success heat embossing on vellum the other day.

The birthday card from the other day made with heat embossing on vellum.

To make "You Make My Heart Flutter" I cut vellum to the size card I wanted to make, layered them with some temporary glue and started to stamp and heat emboss. I started with the sentiment in the center of the card before I decided where the butterflies should go. When I was done heat embossing I  cut matting to each of the vellum pieces and adhered them all together, before I attached it to the front of a card. I then die-cut a butterfly that has a shadow. The shadow was cut from red card stock, and the actual butterfly form vellum. I heat embossed silver on the tips of the wings of the shadow butterfly, before adhering the top and the bottom together. I finished the card off by decorating both the front of the card and the butterfly with some red pearls. 

What can I say? I love my new heat-gun!!

Embossing on vellum

I was not happy with my hot air, or heat gun, so I decided to invest in a new and more powerful one. I talked it over with my better half and he recommended buying an industrial brand that he has lots of experience using in his job. SO I did just that, and ended up buying a Steinel HL1920E. It has an output of 2000W compared to my old craft one that has only 300W. It also has a manual step-less variable temperature of 80-600 degrees Celsius! I was eagerly waiting for its arrival, but at the same time I was really worried that it would scorch my paper.

My new heat gun.

So when it had arrived I put it to the test. I did various embossing powders on various types of card stock, and all in all I was really pleased with the result. It gets really nice and hot, so the actual heat embossing goes really quickly. I do however have to make sure that I don't hold it in the same place for too long, as the paper then will turn brown🔥🧯. Oh, and it is really important to be aware of where I place my fingers😰.

I decided to make a card with the top middle one in the picture, the one with the flock of butterflies flying off.

Birthday card with gold tinsel embossing powder.

The gold embossing powder I have used is Gold Tinsel from Ranger, rangerink.com, and it is a fairly coarse embossing powder. This means that it doesn't melt on smoothly, but is rather rough to the touch, a bit like sand paper.

To me the ultimate test of my new heat gun would be to heat emboss on vellum. I haven't tried that much with my old heat gun as I have struggled to get it warm enough, and have ended up getting a really poor result. Therefore I decided to give it a go and make the whole front of a card out of vellum that was heat embossed. It actually came out really nice! The only thing I would have done differently on this card is that I would have put double sided adhesive on the entire piece of vellum, as smaller strips of double sided adhesive shows through the vellum. On this card I was lucky enough to be able to hide the glue strips behind the flowers.

Birthday card with heat embossed vellum front.

Teddies for you.

Teddies for you.
cardsbyheidiangelika.com

Tried another, for me, new technique today - Triple Layer Stamping Card. Found a couple of tutorials on yet another FB card making page that I follow, Cardmaking Tutorials, Support & Inspiration and since I have admired this type of cards for some time now, I just had to try to make one after having seen the tutorials. 

https://scrappy-hour.com/…/triple-time-stamping-tutorial-t…/
https://www.splitcoaststampers.com/…/tutori…/triplestamping/

I used a couple of stamp sets that I have, stamped, and then I colored the stamps with Copic Markers.
I love the effect the matting gives the card and I found it both an easy and fun card to make!

Love

Valentines Day is closing in, and I have been busy creating love themed cards lately. They are not made with your typical Valentines Day colors, pink and red, but I have chosen to use a different color palette.

The card I wanted to share today is a shaker card. I chose to use a background I created some months ago, when I made a distress oxide "watercolor" by stamping ink on my Tim Holtz Glass Media Mat (rangerink.com, bikuben.com), and spraying water on the ink stain. I then put my card stock face down into the watery ink until it was completely covered with the ink/water mix, and then I misted it with Perfect Pearl Mist (Perfect Pearls also by Ranger, mixed with water) to get a glittery look. I debated with myself which die I was going to use, but ended up with a really beautiful die that is used to cut out part of the  card front.

The die I used, is an unbranded die I have bought on wish.com.

I held the card front up against both black and blue, and decided to go with a black card. I also decided that the die I had used would look good as a shaker card. As always when I make cards I find myself having problems along the way, and this card was no exception. The problem arose when I was going to close the shaker card, as I had the shaker filler inside the front of the card, and couldn't use my regular method of centering the front to the actual card. I ended up winging it, and of course it got a little crooked. 

I die-cut the word love three times out of black cards stock, stacked, and glued them together for some dimension, put some glossy accents (rangerink.com) on the black and let it dry before adhering it onto my card. I finished the card off with some enamel dots from the KSCRAFT Store at AliExpress.com.

Since the card is black, I wanted to make it a little easier to write inside it, so I die-cut out an intricate frame without removing the middle part of it.

With an intricate and decorative white die-cut inside the card, it is a lot easier to write a message for someone.

More interactive cards.

I love that the FaceBook group that I am in have monthly challenges, as it challenges me to try new techniques and to create cards that I never would have otherwise. The online craft store that I mentioned in my last post, s-craft.no, also has monthly challenges, and it so happens that this month the challenge is the same in both groups, interactive cards. Therefore I have created a few more cards with the challenges in mind. First I did yet another Reveal Wheel Card using my Reveal Wheel dies from Lawn Fawn. I have called it "Make a Wish"

 To make this card I decided to use some of my Distress Oxide Sprays from Ranger, rangerink.com, (I have bought them at bikuben.com, another great craft store I use) to create my own background. I used black soot, blueprint sketch, a little broken china and some squeezed lemonade to create the yellow "blobs".

My Distress Oxide Sprays from Ranger

The fairy is from a coordinating stamp and die-set that I have. The fairy is colored with Copic Markers. The sentiment is from the same stamp set.

With the next card I created, I also went for something I haven't tried before, a slider card. You can get dies for making this type of card as well, but I decided to just make my own slider, by using border dies. This worked out really well. I called this card "Oh so happy"

Made with another coordinating stamp and die-set, and colored with Copic Markers. 

Inside the card I stamped "for a friend like you", and on the envelope I stamped "hugs".

Reveal Wheel Cards

A while back I decided to teach myself how to make Reveal Wheel Cards. I had seen many really cute cards both on Pinterest and on Facebook, and one of the FB card making groups I follow has interactive cards as their January challenge. So instead of just making shaker cards, I decided to try something new. In order to do this I needed some new dies and I had an inkling that one of the online craft stores I use, s-craft.no would have them. Which they did! I ordered the "Lawn Fawn Reveal Wheel Custom Craft Dies", along with a bunch of "add-ons", and a few days later I received them in the mail.

www.lawnfawn.com

I started by going to youtube to see if I could find some how-to videos, which turned out to be too much of a success as there were way too many videos to choose from. I settled on a video by Jennifer McGuire, my go-to card making guru, and found a video in which she showed the process in an understandable and clear way. https://youtu.be/0N7XzA5uf3I

I didn't watch the whole video right away, but watched as I tried to follow along. I had cheated a bit and precut a few of the card bases and stamped them already, so when I saw how Jennifer stamped her card and then masked what she had stamped in order to create a background for her image, I got lost as I don't have masking paper. I realized much much later that I do indeed have some masking paper I could have used. Oh well, I can use that on a later card😌. 

So now I had stamped my images on the card fronts, and was faced with the problem of creating backgrounds on the cards. I decided to use some of my watercolor pencils to simply creating a blue sky and a green grass backdrop, not worrying too much that my paper would get warped. I created three really cute porcupine motif card bases.

Then I colored in my simple backgrounds, added water and warped the paper. I used "Perfect Colouring Paper" as I was going to color in my critters with Copic Markers and this is paper that is designed to withstand the alcohol markers without bleeding. This does, however, not mean that it doesn't buckle when you put water on it. Ultimately I don't think it will matter, as I can straighten them out by either weighing them down or even use an iron on them. 

After doing the backgrounds I colored them in.

I then started to assemble the cards. I had created the back for the cards by putting the wheel on with a small brad.

Using the tip of how you should not see any of the indented lines in your little reveal window and in the cut-out where the turning of the wheel happens, I was able to assemble the mechanism quite easily. It was when I went to stamp in my little reveal sentiments on the wheel I started having issues. Jennifer McGuire shared a tip she had learnt of marking the wheel at 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock, and then drawing in the shape of the window with pencil in the opening of the wheel, a tip I did not have too much success with, and I actually ended up ruining my first couple of wheels because I stamped in the wrong places. I went ahead and assembled the top part of my card to the backing anyway, and realized that the front REALLY needs to be flattened out before being adhered to the back part of the card. The result is that I have my little sentiments either too high up, too much to the left or too much to the right in the window. I will probably end up trying to force my card apart to try and salvage the front.

Anyway, I decided to put the porcupine cards to the side and start a completely new card using a different technique for the background. So I went ahead and used distress oxide inks and a stencil to daub in the sky and some ground. Then I just slayed out my stamps in the places that I wanted to have the image.

This was when I understood why Jennifer McGuire stamped and then masked her image BEFORE making the background. Although I wasn't faced with too much of a problem, as the solution of course was to die cut the motives and then adhering them to the background after I had colored them in. If I hadn't used a stamps I had coordinating dies to, I could have fussy-cut the motives out.

I was able to stamp the sentiments on in an acceptable way, and assembled the card to finish it. I added some purple Wink of Stella on the butterflies and some clear Wink of Stella on the deer.

After all that work and brain twisting, I was rather happy with how the card came out. Although I have to mention that I wasn't able to assemble the card totally without mishaps!! (I have realized that I am an expert at ruining my cards with tiny mishaps like stamping mistakes or fingerprints, or crooked assembly....if there is something that can go wrong with a card, you can be sure that it has happened to me!) This time I managed to be a bit impatient and put my thumb nail onto the arrow I had just printed to show which way to turn the wheel, and of course I managed to get an imprint of my nail on a white part of my card. I tried to erase it, but my erasers aren't ment for erasing ink, so I ended up removing it another way. 

This is the finished card:

cardsbyheidiangelika.com

Copic markers.

I am not very experienced with, hence not comfortable coloring with Copic markers, but since I have invested money in getting some, I do need to challenge myself to use them. So, yesterday I decided to sit down and play around a little with them, and I ended up coloring in some roses and leaves that I fussy cut out afterwards. I figured that I couldn't´t just color something without trying to make the end result into a card, so I did. I just finished this simple card using my copic colored roses and leaves.

I stamped Amazing on it and finished it off with some distress oxide ink along the edge (barn door) and some marigolds and some dark red pearls. 

Long time, no postings...

I need to get better at posting my card activity here on my blog. I have been busy sharing on a page I follow on Facebook, and have not taken the time to put out any of my projects in here or on my netsite cardsbyheidiangelika.com. Since I last posted, I have created several cards, although I feel that the Christmas card production took most of my time.

I did make a card though, just because........

that really put me through the ringers....for the simple reason that the background die I was using didn't want to provide me with a clean cut. I managed to make a card, nonetheless. I decided to use the background die-cut result I got and work around it.

This is how the background was supposed to look, but I only got a partially cut result. I chose to color all the little inlays with metallic markers and replace them back into where they had originally been. Then I die cut out labels to cover up the part that had not cut out. I layered them and heat embossed a sentiment in white. 

When I was gluing all the little pieces back in to the background I found out that metallic markers are really messy to work with on tiny objects, as I got metallic ink all over my fingers which resulted in messes on my card stock. Therefore I ended up trying to "fix" the card by adding wink of stella in purple and clear. 

I am fairly happy with the result, although I wish that I had just taken the time to wash my hands instead of getting metallic ink everywhere.

Inside the card I stamped:

and on the envelope "long distance hugs" (visible on the picture with the card).

cardsbyheidiangelika.com