CROCHET WITH FILTERS

PHOTO OF CROCHET MAT

EMBOSS FILTER

GLOWING EDGES FILTER

PHOTOCOPY FILTER

STAMP FILTER

I've spent the last couple of weeks making a couple of crochet mats, so most of my papercrafting has been work-related HOWEVER when I took a picture of one of the finished mats it did occur to me that it would make a great background for a greeting card, and that it was ideally suited to playing with the Photoshop Elements filters.  I've used different colours for each of these examples but other than that its a straightforward application of the filter as captioned to the original image.  I can't wait to get the time to print some of these out and use them!

STAMPING AND COLOURING ON BLACK CARD

STAMPING ON BLACK CARD

This is the same Martha Stewart stamp I used in the yellow card example from a few weeks back, and is another example of colours I rarely use.  Well....I do love black, but I hardly ever stamp onto it.  I've seen a lot of examples using white embossing powder so thought I'd join the crowd.  I probably should have stopped there as I was quite pleased with the result but decided to keep going and colour in the image with metallic gel pens.  The pens work really well on dark surfaces however the colours don't always appear in quite the same way as they do when used on white cardstock (hence the strange purple inner petals).  If the urge to colour on black strikes me again I will do a little sample swatch BEFORE I start.

RESIN V DIMENSIONAL MAGIC

We bought ourselves a Forstener drill bit....its the sort that drills a large hole with a flat bottom.  My husband is a woodworker and I am (obviously) interested in all things papery so we have been trying some ways of combining the two.

We were aiming at a sort of shiny button effect (with the thought of using it to decorate wooden boxes or jewelry) so we compared paper covered with Dimensional magic to the same covered with two-part resin.  Neither seemed to cause the dye in the (Kaiser) paper to run which was good as I had anticipated we may need to seal it first (I'd still do a test run before a proper project with other papers).  The DM despite my best efforts still had a couple of bubbles.  I'd read that a heat gun would cause them to disappear so duly got out my embossing heat gun and........nothing at all happened to the surface  at all  until the whole thing essentially started to blow up like a big bubblegum bubble and then burst!!!!  This was amusing  but not very encouraging as the end result was all cracked and scratched.  I popped the bubbles on the "second try" effort with a pin, which worked better.  The finish on the two part resin was by far the smoothest and shiniest but it had the effect of greatly darkening the paper which wasn't entirely ideal either.

The end result is that both finishes have potential but drawbacks..........more playtime needed!!!

EMBOSSED DIE CUT OWLS

EMBOSSED DIECUTS

Pop die cuts into embossing folders to "dress them up"l.  this die is one of the Marianne Collectables range.  I've put the owls together slightly differently.  (The tummy of the top one makes a tail in the second) but they share the same parts.  I've left the eyes untouched, as messing around with eyes can end up making them look a bit scary.  The embossing was done on Core'dinations paper and then lightly sanded, to highlight the detail.