This month we are working with Graphic 45 and I was sent some of the beautiful Nature Sketchbook which you can find here. There are loads of lovely bits you can cut out - like the flowers and butterflies, and I also had a play at assembling my own flower from the flower pack - they are double sided and I just curled them up, layered them and added a button to the centre.
The other thing I tried out was some of the new Distress Oxides - I saw them in some of Tim Holtz's U-tube videos after the Winter Craft and Hobbies Association conference. They are a mix between a dye and chalk ink, and particularly good for layering up and also using on darker card stock because when you add water they become more opaque which gives them their oxide name. You can do all the things that you can normally do with distress inks, so blend and add water droplets and all those sorts of things but a little bit more. The range of colours is opening up but you will find your favourites in amongst the mix and you can use them with your normal distress inks too. I think they stamp slightly better than normal distress inks - but I'm not an expert stamper so give it a try for yourself.
For this background I added a few colours to a piece of plastic, then spritzed water and added stamped the plastic onto my card stock- you need to dry between each layer with a heat gun, and then once it is mostly dry you can repeat the process, so you get lovely layers of colour without it becoming too muddy. After I had created my inky background I then added a little bit of stamping and the papers.
