Around the House

Woohoo!............ It's Friday

and here is super project using an item

we all have in the house. 

Over to you Chris Dark 

I’ve enjoyed creating some ATCs using the easiest of household items to find which is salt! This is a time honoured watercolour technique but it works beautifully with distress ink too. I've incorporated Kay Carley's gorgeous Cosmos Flower Stamps for PaperArtsy to create this set of summary floral ATCs which give a nice burst of colour and work really well size-wise on the ATCs

Cut ATCs from watercolour paper and add distress inks direct from the pad, I added roughly half and half of a couple of colours in each ATC.

Spritz all the ATCs with water, it needs to be quite wet but not running off the card then sprinkle over the salt. I've used sea salt in this case but rock salt can also be used and that will give a slightly different effect.

In this close up of the salt it can be seen how quickly it begins to soak up the ink. Leaving the card to dry naturally gives the best results.

When the card has completely dried remove all the salt to reveal the lovely mottled background. As I used sea salt and the nature of the crystals is flakes I was left in some areas with a slight residue which I scrubbed back lightly with kitchen paper

With the PaperArtsy Kay Carley Stamps use the stalk part of the stamp with back ink and stamp at angles onto the card, fill in with other grass stamp. Repeat this for all the ATCs

I made some pretty multicoloured flowers using the head of the more open cosmos flower. First I prepared some book paper with a watered down coat of gesso and added distress inks to this when the gesso was dry. I stamped the flower multiple times and cut them all out. In some areas I added a bit more distress ink with a sponge

I also added two of the sentiments on to scraps of the book paper and I hand wrote a couple as well. The sentiments were cut out and glued on together with the flowers. I've added some black distress marker around the sentiments and used black and white pens to add dots and highlights to the stamping.

Did I say it was a super project?  Wasn't wrong, was I?!  

Many thanks Chris

Here are the links you need to find the ingredients

Chris used:

Distress Inkpads
Kay Carley Stamps

DecoArt Gesso

Daler-Rowney Watercolour Pad

White Gelly Roll Pen

Black Gelly Roll Pen

Black Soot Distress Marker


'Bye for now
Mickie x