Thursday, April 30, 2009

TECHNIQUE THURSDAY!

Over on our forums, we do a fun little monthly challenge called Scrapbuilders. It is like playing "telephone" when you were a kid - you know that game where you whisper something into someone's ear they whisper it into the next persons ear and it continues until you get to the end and when the last person tells the secret, it always comes out totally different than what the original whisper was....well this is the same way with Scrapbuilders. An original layout is picked and emailed to the first person (we usually have 3 teams as we have a lot of scrappers who like to play!) who then has 3 days to scraplift the layout and email it back. It is amazing to see how much things change and how different styles can come from an original! This is the original layout that was chosen this month:
This layout was done by member JENSCARLETT on our forums and I just loved it! The colours and the design were just beautiful. I was the last person on an 8 member team and the layout that was sent to me by KYLAKOO on our forums looked like this:
I had to flip the layout in order to accomodate my pictures and my layout looked like this:
Things sure changed from the original huh?!!
And so by now, you are probably wondering why this post is called Technique Thursday?!! Welllll.... I got a lot of questions about the foam letters so I thought I would share it with you! A close up of the letters:

These letters are foam letters courtesy of my near and dear Dollar Store! I love them and everytime I pop in, I buy all the black and white letters that are there. They are super versatile and the white ones are especially great as you can change them into whatever colour you need!

Place your letters on a transparency and simply colour your letters using ink - I used alcohol ink but you could use regular ink as well (just know that they take a lot longer to dry, you could also use markers). Take a stamp, preferably a larger stamp that would cover your entire letter such as a background stamp and cover it with Versamark Ink. Heat your letters using a heat gun - the letters will start to melt and they will appear to get "flatter". Quickly press your stamp into the letters - press hard and hold for about 10 seconds and voila!!

The Versamark is used as a release - so that your stamp doesn't get stuck in the letters. The transparency is used so that you are able to move your letters off of it and place it on your page. If you put them directly on your page first, I would worry about warping your paper or the Versamark getting on your page. A friend and I were also talking and saying you could probably also run them through a Cuttlebug? Anyone ever tried that? I think I shall attempt it this evening!! Hope your week is going much better than mine :)

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