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This blog is for sharing a love of paper crafting. You can also check out my Pintrest pages. If you find the ideas here to be helpful, I'd love to hear from you. It is what helps make the time I put into this blog feel worthwhile, and always brightens my day. I love hearing your ideas too!

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Monday, December 24, 2012

Antiquing Techniques


Today's focal made use of some antiquing techniques.  The focal bird design was from a Victorian ornament book I purchased a long time ago and the design itself looked like this when I started:


To get the antique look, I inked the edges with brown ink, covered the whole element with embossing ink from a stamp pad, and then with clear UTEE (Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel). I heat embossed it, then quickly dipped it again in the UTEE before it could cool.  After repeating this step a couple of times, after heat embossing it I placed it face down over a bunch of microbeads before it cooled.  Then it was back to the embossing ink and UTEE for several more layers.  After I was happy with the thickness of the UTEE, before it cooled too much I bent it in various places to crack the UTEE.  Finally I rubbed a bunch of brown ink over the cracks.  That gave me an element that looked like this:


What a difference!  I already had the mat die cut - a leftover from a different card.  I added a little tag with a stamped greeting to this.  A bit of ribbon, and some die cuts (from Spellbinders Holly Motifs) for the corners, and my card is finished.

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