Mulberry Batik Samples
I had a Stampin’ Up! retirement party last night where I actually, gulp….sold some of my older retired stamp sets! I had such a hard time letting them go – but at least I know that they’ll be going to good homes. 🙂
One of the techniques I demonstrated at the party was a mulberry batik technique shown in last month’s Stampin’ Success. In fact, I CASEd a card right from the magazine – I was having a stressed-out-with-too-much-to-do-to-be-original moment (but it quickly passed). Here’s the card I copied (isn’t that why they send us that magazine, anyway?):
The technique starts with white mulberry paper. The image is stamped using Versamark then heat-embossed with clear embossing powder. After spritzing the mulberry paper with water, ink was applied with a sponge. The embossed images resist the ink and end up end up sheer and translucent.
According to SU!, you should then take an iron and heat the embossed image between copy paper until the embossing powder melts and sticks to the paper. But from what I’ve heard on SCS, this part of the technique doesn’t work so well, so I skipped it and still got the effect I was looking for.
The above card uses Taken with Teal and Old Olive – sounds like an unappetizing color combo until you see them together. And there is white cardstock behind the mulberry to make the embossed images really pop.
So after I got out of my panic, I tried an original card on my own using Balmy Breezes (I can’t believe that set is retiring!!!!):
This time I used the direct-to-paper technique to apply Old Olive ink over the mulberry paper, I also wet and tore the edges and put caramel cardstock behind the palm tree image instead of white.
And I did an original little 6X6 scrapbook page too:
I used Petal Prints (another of my favorite sets that is retiring!) and A is For Adorable. And this time, I used re-inkers with an aquapainter to color in the flower image. I have a white circle of cardstock behind the mulberry paper so that you can see the flower outline on the finished page.