Cover a Card: Distress cards

Hi, 
Hope you had a lovely weekend :)


This week we will be talking about backgrounds, or more precisely background stamps with the beautiful Cover-a-Card stamps by Impression Obsession. You will see how our talented DT has been using them. Lots of different ways for lots of different projects.. 
Are you ready? Today we start with Neil and how he used those stamps with Distress inks for a watercolour effect.

To achieve a water colouring look, I lay the stamp onto my work surface, face up and add random colours with distress ink pads to cover the whole stamp. (I don't worry about mixing the colours onto my pads as I've never had any contamination but I do recommend working light to dark just in case!)

When you've covered the stamp with ink then spritz the surface with water and take a sheet of white and and lay it over the stamp and gently rub to ensure the whole surface is covered. Lift off and dry with a heat gun.

You can usually get a second print, lighter than the first without re inking)

To make the second card I created two sheets of this colour and trimmed and matted one onto white card to fit a 15 x15cm grey card blank and the other one I cut using the Alterations tattered floral die and used 3 pieces to create the flower. To finish I added a small gem to the centre of the flower and more gems to the card to finish.

I've left the card front empty of words so that it I need a quick card for a specific occasion I can just add "Thank You; Congratulations" etc.

Card number one uses Wild Honey, Crushed Olive and Stormy Sky distress inks and card number two uses Tumbled Glass and Dusty Concord distress ink

Materials
Cover a card stamp: Geologic

Grey and white A4 card

Distress inks

Small adhesive gems

Sizzix Alterations Tattered floral die

Tip of the day

Neil's technique does not require the 6x6 acrylic block because any "blurriness" you might get is part of the water colouring look. 

But if you want to achieve a crisp and sharp image (which most of the time you do), you will need the 6x6 block. 

The Mega Mount (that's what it's called) is a curved block especially designed for those large stamps. Without this block, the centre part of the image would not stamp properly. I'm sure many of you have experienced this in the past, which is very frustrating. 

It also has a very practical handle which really helps (try holding and stamping comfortably with a very large square block... not great is it?).

So thanks to that curve, each point of your stamp will be pressed down and therefore you will get a perfect image effortlessly.

So here's how it goes... Place your Cover-a-card stamp on the block, ink it up, and then stamp from left to right (or the other way... whatever is more comfortable for you) following the curve of the stamp. There you have your perfectly stamped image.

Of course, you can use your mega block with other stamps... especially those large stamps to avoid that blind spot in the middle. 

See you tomorrow