Playing With Paper and a Collage

My friend, Beth, a member of my FiberWorks group, made a lot of handmade paper recently and generously gave out zip-lock bags full at our last and only in-person meeting a couple of weeks ago. I was thrilled to be a recipient and am combining them with some of my paper techniques.

We haven't met for the last two weeks because of weather so we Zoomed instead, as we had all summer. The weather promises to be perfect tomorrow and we will meet again in Myra's yard, socially distanced and masked. We so enjoyed our last meeting. Show and Tell is just not the same on Zoom.

For this first one I adhered the hand made paper to a rust colored card base after tearing it down slightly to fit. Then I adhered my paper which was made using heavy weight Bristol paper and Distress Inks, using the "smoosh method" I smeared some ink onto my craft pad, spritzed it with water then laid  my paper on top and pressed down. Dried with my heat gun and repeated with new or the same colors. After I had all the colors I wanted I used a stencil and more Distress Inks to get those tiny circles. Then I stamped the daisy design with VersaMark and used black embossing powder. Heat set that to get a glossy look.  Last step was to go around the paper with a buttonhole stitch on my Bernina.

Same techniques as the one above, except instead of using a stencil, I splattered some diluted ink onto the paper as a last step. Hard to tell from the photo, but instead of stamping the tree in black, I used navy blue, which I thought was not as harsh.

This one is a little different. Again I applied some Distress Ink onto my craft pad and picked it up with a brayer, blue one way and yellow the other, then used parts of three different stencils. The dandelions are a die cut, giving a little more dimension. If I do this again I think I will cut the flowers out of a darker color. 

I still have a stack of Beth's papers and hope to make some more of these. I am not putting a sentiment on the front of these cards because then I can use them for any occasion and perhaps someone might want to frame them. Thank you, Beth!

The prompt for this month's collage was Tree and I used my usual "formula" with pages torn from an old encyclopedia, 2 unabridged dictionaries and the online dictionary. Again I printed my images onto tracing paper so that you could read the text beneath it. I had quite a bit of that dark green velvet that you see in the upper left hand corner. It is a double shot velvet, meaning that is is woven using red and green threads. If you look at it from one angle it looks red, the other angle, green. For some reason I thought it would emboss red and that I couldn't use it. So I spent waaaaay too much time dyeing and over dyeing small pieces of white velvet to get the right color. Then, as it turned out, that original velvet embossed green so I decided to use all three greens. I am pleased with the results, another mixed media collage.

 I still have green fingers because my glove had a hole it it. I got most of it off with a wonderful product made just for that purpose, called Kresto. Got it online quite awhile ago, but can't remember where.

I am linking up with Off the Wall Friday