Sing Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! This card is saying how I feel tonight about the Dreamweaver Dream Team. The team's new challenge cards are starting to come in and some of the team members are starting to post these on their blogs. (Be sure to take a look...their blog links are listed here on my site.) I am so excited about all the new things I have to show you, but for the next week I will be showcasing a "last Hurrah" to cards made by the team this summer. Next I will give just a bit of a tease for things to come. "Shhh...don't tell anyone, they'll banish us you know"... (oh, my! sometimes I just can't get Emily Dickinson out of my head). Anyway, I digress, things to come...things to come. Oh, yeah! I was saying... look for something fun coming soon to our blogging team. Do you like good things to eat? What is sweet and spun from sugar and often pink? Like this pretty card made by Dream Team member Louise Healy.

I had to give her a bit of a talking to for tearing up an old hymnal, but the background is just so appropriate for the new Hallelujah stencil (LM2007) that I couldn't feel too bad. (I used to collect old hymnals.) She gently brushed a brown ink across the paper to antique it a bit more, even though it really is from an old hymnal I think the antiquing really adds to the overall aged effect. Next she pasted the word across a portion of torn page using the Pearlescent Embossing Paste. The string of pink beads seems to pull the torn pieces of music together. I do love this card. Anyone needing a lift would love getting this in the mail...I am trying to figure out how to reproduce the piece of music just in case I need to send a music loving friend a similar masterpiece. Any suggestions Louise?

Scrapbooking.Com

Hey, everyone! We are moving into the holiday weekend and some of you are having your last hurrah at the beaches and your other favorite vacation spots...do enjoy. As I am thinking of my own plans I was reminded that Pam Hornschu has done a couple of beautiful scrapbook pages of past vacations. She has been featured this week on scrapbooking.com with another page as well. Also, a week ago, they named her blog ..."Blog of the Week". She deserves it and she does a great job writing about her design work. The page you see here features a background stencil we call "petals" (LJ899). She stenciled it onto a light aqua paper using a slightly darker ink and a larger 3/4" stencil brush. She then used a variety of shell stencils to add interest to the lower half of the page; the nautilus, the sand dollar and the scallop shell and the numbers are respectively,LM104, LR12, LM106. I love how she seemed to literally tie it all together with the off-white twine for a nautical look. Great job Pam!

Pastel Polly

Polly Weed has been stenciling with Dreamweaver Stencils for many eons, almost as many eons as me. LOL! She has a very distinctive style. She usually stencils with pastels and then uses either the regular Dreamweaver embossing paste on top of this or the translucent embossing paste which she then sprinkles with glitter. This particular card she has veered slightly from her usual style, but she has maintained her signature technique as she still loves those pretty soft pastel colors. The way she achieved this beautiful little Christmas tree (LG729) is by mixing just a bit of green tube acrylic paint into the glossy white embossing paste. This is the best way to make your own pastel colored paste. The glossy white paste has white pigment in it and adding small amounts of tube acrylic color will give you just about any pastel color that you want. She finished off this beautiful card by adding some crystals throughout the coiled area of the tree. Just for a different twist on this card design, I put a small amount of the Navajo Blue Metallic F/X, maybe 1/4 tsp. into 2 Tbsp. of pearlescent embossing paste and pasted this second coil Christmas tree. One nice thing about using the Metallic F/X is that it is dry and you don't have to worry about adding wetness to the paste which would make it a bit sloppy to paste. I find that adding the crystals using the "grab-it" tool while the paste is still wet works best for me. The design team is working on a new challenge and we will be posting some of their work soon...and there are rumors of a blog hop in the near future. Stay tuned for more.

Julie from Down Under

Julie Makela lives just south of Brisbane, Queensland in Australia. She is an absolute marvel when it comes to using Dreamweaver Stencils. In the past few years she finished her degree in Art and her love for mixed media shows in everything she does. I am always fascinated with her ability to layer and cut things. Here I am showing cards she has done using some of this mixed media pizzazz. Behind the penguins she sculpted white emboss paste to create the mountains. The penguins (LL560) were paste embossed with black embossing paste onto an acetate film and once they were dry she turned the piece over. Using just a bit of the white embossing paste on a brush...she painted their bellies and other white parts on the back of the acetate. Then when that was dry she cut the acetate close to their heads and mounted them on the mountains, hiding the mounting tape on the reverse side of the penguins.

The lizards (LM2004) were done in a similar manner, pasted onto acetate, however this time she sprinkled glitter onto the wet embossing paste. When this was dry she turned the acetate over and colored the back of the acetate using acrylic on a brush, then when this dried she cut out the lizards and mounted them with foam mounting tape onto a white cardstock. This white paper was dry embossed with the petal background stencil (LJ899) and just a bit of ink was loaded onto either a large foam dauber or large stencil brush and then brushed across the dry embossed petals to leave a hint of color.

Julie is the one responsible for teaching me the "JAC" paper technique...remember the cardinal that Louise Healy did early on...I mentioned how Julie does this unique effect in one of my first blog postings. I hope to see Julie Makela at CHA in 2011 and I know she will be sharing some new techniques at one of the booths there. Stay in touch to hear more as we get closer to the New Year. By the way Julie, when you get a chance to read this...if one of the above steps is not quite right just let us know in the comment section.

Tips on Embellishing Paste with Micro Beads

Marj is another Dreamweaver Stencil teacher and calls the Pacific Northwest area home. Wish I lived close enough to join her classes at the store, Art n' Soul in Lacey Washington. She has many innovative ideas and the cards you see here are samples of a wonderful technique of using micro beads on top of the Dreamweaver Embossing Pastes. Her recommendations for sprinkling on the beads is to leave the stencil in place. The reason for this is that if you take the stencil off after doing the pasting and then try to sprinkle the beads on the wet paste...then those little round devils just slide down into the detail of the design and in this case the creation just becomes a turtle shape rather than a sea turtle (LM179) with a "dude" personality. Next you have to deal with beads stuck all over your pasted stencil when you go to scrub it in your pan of water. So Marj suggests that you go ahead and wash the stencil in a pan of water and then place a strong paper towel into a strainer and pour your dirty paste water through this paper towel to catch all the excess beads. Great idea Marj, I have done this in a couple of classes and people love the idea of being able to capture them and reuse them once they are dried. I also love the free form pasting Marj did on the background piece of the turtle card. And I am also posting a dragon (LL588) done with the same technique. The background is bamboo (LL533) stenciled with a metallic ink.

Metallic F/X Finesse

People have had quite a few questions lately about how to use the Metallic F/X powders. I like using them on the Black Embossing Pastes, but you can use them on any color. Both the Matte and the Glossy pastes will give you some startling results. I love contrast and the Peacock (LG731) you see here was pasted with the Dreamweaver Glossy Black Embossing Paste onto a metallic white card stock. To dry my pasted pieces more quickly I have a very large old electric skillet that I put on the warm (lowest) setting and then place my pasted pieces into it. To dry it this way takes less than 25 min. for the glossy pastes to dry and less than 15 min. for the matte pastes, this is less than half the usual time. I then repositioned the stencil onto the dried design and tapped the Stamp & Stick Gluepad all over the stencil using a jumbo foam dauber. I used the color "kiwi" for the leafy swirls and when I load my gold handled Dreamweaver stencil brush I just dip it 1/8" into the powder and then tap tap tap the excess into the lid of the powder to remove the excess and push the powder up into the bristles. When I work on top of the "glossy" paste, which is any of them that have a slick shiny look to them when they are dry, I use a stippling technique for application or a tap tap tapping motion. I used the colors- sapphire, purple satin, glacier lake, goldfinch and gold dust to stencil the bird. If you want to shade with a second color, base coat the area you are working on with the stippling application and then daub on more of the Palette Stamp & Stick Glue to this same area, because you have covered up the glue with your first coat of Metallic F/X. Now you will stencil this same area again by adding your next color for a shaded effect. This time you can use a stroking motion or circular rouging technique to achieve a smooth airbrushed look. Since I like contrast I often leave some of the black glossy paste showing through rather than filling it entirely with color. I believe this contrast will really makes your stenciling pop! When you take the stencil off of the design you may notice a bit of a haloing of the Metallic F/X, sort of like dust, on your background paper. The Swiffer dusting refill cloths can be used to pick up this excess powder. Just do it gently so that your work does not smear. Enjoy!

Stenciling in Upstate New York

Theresa Winters is another talented stenciling teacher. She owns a small rubber stamp store in Rome, NY called Sweethearts Rubber Stamps. She also travels the New England area and teaches stenciling classes as a Dreamweaver Stencils independent sales rep. A while back she was working in her classroom and had pasted the horses (LL559) you see here with the metallic copper embossing paste and set them aside and started working on a project using the Metallic F/X powders. When she turned back to pick up the horse card she realized that the pasted piece had a fine sprinkling of metallic mica powders all over it. Evidently there was a fan blowing across the room and it had carried a fine mist of the mica powders that she had been working with onto her horses that were in the process of drying. Just another opportunity to develop a new technique. She also suggested that if you have a stencil design that is delicate that you don't leave the stencil on while you are sprinkling the image with powders, because if you leave the stencil on too long when you try to take it off the paste will have dried into the stencil and the paper may rip. I know the complaint is that the powder then gets all over the cardstock. She recommends that once it is dry take a Swiffer dust cloth and pick up the powder on the background areas. These Swiffer cloths are great for cleaning up glitter and small particles of metallic leafing as well. Theresa has many other techniques up her sleeve and if you are ever in the Rome, NY area you must drop in to see her store. She will soon be teaching in the Boston area at "Ink About It", Westford, Mass. Her classes fill quickly so call sooner than later.