Guest Designer - Julia Dunnit - Part 1

Hello.
Read gently, please - I’m a bit shy today. My name is Julia, I’m a blogger over at www.stamping-ground.blogspot.com. Being a blogger meant that it was only a matter of time until someone ‘enabled’ my discovery of Quietfire Design. 

 

I discovered stamping about 20 years ago; put down my sewing needle and turned irrevocably to paper and ink. I still love stamps above all, and I’m a font junkie. I have friends who say that I’m unable to make a card without having some words on the front.  They are probably right. Quietfire Design has become another of my reasons for using the written word – why wouldn’t you when they are all so beautifully lettered? So it makes sense to accept an invitation to guest on the DT right? Ignorance is bliss.  I had no idea how self critical and terrified I could become!  Ah well...’face the fear and do it anyway’.

 So now, allowing for my amateur status in all things, have a look at what I’ve been making….

 I used good watercolour stock and dripped Distress Stain onto the wetted area, then used the heat gun to dry it because I'm too impatient to wait. Next, I die cut it (it's a Joy die) and ran a silver Krylon pen around the edge.  You can't tell, but the text is embossed - Versacolour Imperial Blue and embossed with clear powder.  Nor can you tell that the Dragonfly is highlighted with silver Glamour Dust.  As was my face, and of course my decolletage....clumsy, moi?


While I was squashing the Distress stain against the corner of an acrylic block to produce enough liquid to drip onto the wet water-colour paper, I had another idea and decided to 'go grand' so that I could use one of my favourite stamps; it’s from this set. If there's a trick to this, it's to stamp the text and emboss it before you do anything else, so that the plastic surface of the embossing can resist the inks. I used white embossing powder to maintain the contrast.



Credit of course, to Sizzix and T. Holtz Esq for the die, and to Provocraft for the embossing folder. You can see too that I can’t tell when I've finished, so I used a white gel pen to doodle a border top and bottom and then to 'stitch' some of the coloured blobs (technical term) together.

Julia has three more wonderful cards to share with us later on this month. Stay tuned!