Elaine's Layering Work

While the Design Team is working on new card designs, I would like to introduce you to some of the teachers and sales reps across the country who have inspired me over the years. Elaine Benedict has been stenciling and teaching for Dreamweaver Stencils from our beginnings in the early 90's. She is from the Chicago area and teaches and reps our products in Wisconsin, Illinois and Eastern Iowa. For this piece she sprayed the background with the Memories Mists...using both the regular mists and the Vivids. The Vivid Mists are highly pigmented and are a bit tricky to use because they are pigment based and can clog the atomizers, but cleaning the atomizer with hot water after usage and shaking them well before usage keeps them spraying and as you can tell they give strong color contrasts for a spray. She then paste embossed the pussy willow (LL3007) to the left of the card using the Dreamweaver Glossy Black Paste. The large vase (LG615) was first dry embossed (by hand using a large tipped stylus and light table) ...since this is a simple design doing it by hand goes very quickly, but you could also put it through your embossing machine with the layering process I mentioned a couple of days ago. When the embossing was finished she left the stencil in place and very lightly shaded around the edge of the vase with a 1/2" stencil brush. Next the mosaic swirl background stencil (LJ901) was placed under the vase stencil and she stenciled a variety of soft green inks using 1/2" stencil brushes. Using these large brushes makes the job go more quickly and leaves a soft mix of the three shades of green pigment ink. Next she stenciled using a jumbo dauber with the Versamark inkpad on top of the green inks. She then removed both stencils and sprinkled on Suze Weinberg's Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel, which she then heated with a heat gun. For a sharp crisp look she mounted the vase onto glossy black cardstock and cut it out leaving just a 1/16" border. If you are interested in taking a class with Elaine try one of the rubber stamp or scrapbook stores in these midwest states it will be worth it! She has quite a following of students that enjoy her classes and work.