The Accidental Tutorialist!

It's true. I'm gonna post a completely accidental tutorial. Stifle snickering and snorting if you already know this because I'm all stoked that I found it while trying to be a smarty pants.

So I sat down to CASE a card by Jenn and I thought it needed a little ribbon.

So first, I dyed some white taffeta ribbon with Pacific Point Blue ink. (To do this, just lay your ribbon on your ink pad, hold it down tightly with a sponge dauber and pull the ribbon between the pad and the dauber several times until it's the shade you like.) After you do this the first time, you realize that this stays wet FOREVER and you have to heat set it if you want to get on with your life free of the Pacific Point Blue pawprints you will be leaving everywhere from your wet ribbon. Jenn & I had already chatted about this earlier in the week.

HOWEVER, what we did not chat about was not getting distracted by Martha Stewart while heat setting your ribbon! Which, of course, I did. I held the heat gun too close to the ribbon for too long while I watched her make this awesome risotto. When I finallly looked back at my ribbon, it had scrunched itself into this cool ruffly shape that I just LOVED! Now what I didn't love was the color that the dyed ribbon became - kind of a civil war blue grey, so I switched to plain white. There was kind of a lot of color on this card anyway.



At moments like these, I'm always certain I can't recreate my accident, but it's really pretty easy. This Stampin' Up! taffeta ribbon won't endlessly scrunch - it has a max scrunch value of what I'm showing you here - but it's pretty cool. Once you get a little divot, you just move the heat gun over a little, wait for the scrunch, move it down a little, repeat!

I held mine down with my scissors, but they got BLAZING hot, so you might want to use something more inert.

Inert? Is that right? Probably not. Oh well. Somebody else can worry about that.

So to make this card, make yourself an ink pad out of two paper towels, held together and folded into quarters. Pour bleach on the towels. Voila - bleach ink!

Ink up your Inspired by Nature grass stamp and stamp onto Pacific Point Blue. Do the same on a scrap with the "enjoy" stamp from Bursting with Joy. Set these aside to dry. Scrunch your ribbon according to the tutorial. Distress your grass panel with your scissors. Add a silver hodgepodge hardware element to ribbon and ahere to big panel. Punch greeting with the 1" circle punch and attach to the silver Hodgepodge Hardware frame and secure with brads. Mount onto a Pacific Point Blue card base. & ENJOY. :)

Then, since my desk wasn't nearly messy enough, I decided to make one more card before the night was over. What was in my mailbox when I got home from my editing session? The new Doodle Factory set - the Great Outdoors and a new sentiment set!!

YEEHAW!! There are so many cute images in this set I didn't know where to start. Well I sorta did because I knew that I needed to confine myself to a 1 square inch workspace by adding the Sizzix to my desk and using the next die - OHHH I love this die!!! I used my Basic Grey DSP, and colored my little "Pogue" image with Copics (E74, RV11 and YR00) and carefully cut him out. I popped him up with dimensionals onto my sassy sizzixed piece. Then I used several punches to mat the greeting, including an extra long arrow with my arrow punch.

To do this - when your greeting is longer than the arrow, just cut a 1/2" strip of cardstock with a much wider piece at the end. Imagine a T-square. pull the 1/2" strip through the punch so it's safe, and just punch the tip of the arrow out of the wider piece of cardstock, and there you have an arrow of any length you choose.

I thought his expression was perfect for this new sentiment. I punched tiny circles of coordinating Basic Grey, and mounted it all on Pirouette Pink and Bravo Burgundy.

Hope your weekend was fun!