Easter Egg dying with Distress Ink

Easter Eggs dying with Tim Holtz distress Inks

Happy Easter Crafters! Here is our first easter project showing step by step how to dye eggs with distress inks.

Easter Egg dying with Distress Inks

Step one: Make holes in either end of the eggs. A needle will do but we used a dremel for a quick solution.
Step two: Blow the contents out of the slightly larger hole in the bottom after first scrambling the insides with a pin to make it easier. If wanting to use the egg contents later for breakfast or lunch make sure any piercing equipment is clean.
Step three: Wash eggs with cold water. Run tap over and through, submerge in bowl of water and blow out water. Use microwave in ten second bursts to dry and sterilise or leave on paper towels in sun to dry.
Step four: Use electrical tape to makes spirals around egg or cut into strips for letters.
Step five: In a pot goes a teaspoon of white vinegar, one cup of hot water and 5-20 drops of distress ink.
Step five: Put eggs carefully in water with dye after stirring dye in. Allow to sit for five minutes, turn occasionally. Dripping extra drops directly onto the eggs produces more dramatic effects but don't turn the dripped on side back into the inky water.
Step six: Remove and leave on paper towels to dry. At this stage you are meant to move the electrical tape slightly so that the second colour produces an interesting effect from the overlapped area but I wasn't feeling lucky so I chickened out (get it chicken, egg bah ha!) and didn't attempt it.
Step seven: Repeat with second colour.
Step eight: Once dry remove electrical tape and you're done!

Use the marker spritzer for special effects of speckled distress maker colours.

Film Strip punch - ek tools and 3M glue applicator

Film strip punch from Ek Tools used to show photos in a series by Crafterlala

Here's another little video I did. It's not the best quality sorry. I will get better I promise! You tube compresses it a lot so the original wasn't this blurry but it still gives you the idea of what I'm trying to show which is how you can use this film strip punch to show off a series of photos when one just doesn't tell the story. If you can give me a thumbsup click in Youtube it would be appreciated. Or comment under this post. Currently (16th April 2014) ( Martha Stewart punches are on sale at Scotties so if you get inspired stop on by the site and check out the deals.

Distress Paints as stamps, 3 ways to apply Distress Inks

Journal card decorated with distress paints and inks

Here's a little video I did. It shows three ways you can apply distress ink and how you can use distress paint as a stamp medium. My son is in the background being "helpful" moving the bottles of paint around ha ha! If you click on the little "watch on youtube" button at the bottom right of the video window you will be able to help me out by clicking the thumbs up if you "like" my video and maybe even subscribe to the channel (not sure where you find that button.) Cheers for watching.

Get distress paint here.

Get distress ink here.

New mini ink blending tool here.

Blank journal cards here.

Distress Paints - Doin' the Holtz effect

That cool thing Tim Holtz does with distress paint and a mini spritzer by Miss Crafter

We all know Tim Holtz is a star crafter! Have you ever tried that little thing he does in videos with the distress paints splurged on some plastic then sqwuigging (my word but you can use it) them onto a tag and voila it looks fantastic. Well I thought I would give it a go. Some new distress paint colours have become available at Scotties. I grabbed a few colours for myself to play with but I'm not sure if any of the ones I got are the new shades. They are all new to me though and  I love them. So much less messy than paint tubes and you don't end up with wasted blobs of paint.

Step one: Find yourself some type of plastic surface. I usually use icecream container lids for my palettes but this was the plastic sleave from a gift box.

Trying out the Tim Holtz effect with distress paints 

Step two: Splurge some paint from several different colours in close proximity on the plastic surface. Then spritz the surface of the paints with a little water from a mini spritzer.

Distress Paint being spritzed on a plastic surface with mini sprtizer

Tim Holtz distress paints and a blank journal card meet

Step three: Take a blank journal card or gift tag (or whatever paper or card stock you like really) and sqwuige and wiggle it around face down on the wet paint. Wiggle enough to get the colours slightly overlapping but not so much as to create a muddy single colour.

Ranger Mini Spritzer used on distress paints 

Step four: Turn the paper over and spritz with a Tim Holtz Spritzer. Enough that the colours run a little together and get some interesting watercolour effects but not enough that they run altogether and off the paper into a runny mess.

Step five: Either leave to dry naturally or use a heat gun to get it to set before too much running occurs thus preserving the most interesting pattern achieved in the few moments after the water wicks the paint a little across the page.

Distress paint bottles lined up next to the penultamate result. Watch this space.

Ok so it looked a little better than this after it dried and I don't have the photo to prove it yet. For some reason I forgot to photograph the end result in both cases but I will update this post when I do. Below is the step by step process again with a craft tag, once again failure to photograph end result, doh! But it looked quite cool once I did a second layer of sqwuigging and stenciled and stamped, building up the layers ala holtz himself.

Blog update: This just in. I have now posted this photo below of the final result. It looks a little different when it drys. I would probably add some more layers to this before using it in a spread but I might need to go shopping for some new stencils first. Hmmmm...

Final result Becky Higgins blank journal card with Tim Holtz paint effect and misted spray.

Step by step tutorial on Tim Holtz distress paint effect used on crafters tag.

Final result Tim Holtz layered paint effect, stenciling and stamping on crafters tag.

This tutorial by Miss Crafter of Crafterlala 

Distress Marker Spritzer - Head in the clouds

Head in the Clouds - Full page Scrapbook layout using Graphic45 paper Mother Goose

I was excited about two things when doing this layout. You can laugh if you like but it was my first full page scrapbook layout. Up until then I had only done pocket layouts. I was a little nervous about breaking out from the neatly defined rectangles and going so free with my layout...but I think it turnned out ok. What do you think? (Please comment below this post). Secondly I was playing with the new Tim Holtz Marker Spritzer. It's fresh from CHA and very cool but I have a little disclaimer here. This layout is not the best example of it in use as I hadn't got the hang of it yet! More projects will follow. Just to show you it does work when you know what you're doing I will put a picture of a butterfly my son did as part of a lovely letter he crafted.

My son using the Tim Holtz Marker Spritzer

Now back to the scrapbooking, I started out with a base of blue American Craft cardstock 12x12 of course. I began experimenting with Graphic45's Mother Goose paper which I had nabbed a while ago and put in store knowing one day I would start scrappin my daughter's baby photos. So here I was inspired by the "Bedtime Story" line on the paper so I cut that out using my knife, ruler and self healing mat. I also cut the strip of nursery rhyme stamps and played around a while deciding which should act as the bed for the photo to rest on. I used the rule of thirds, more or less, in placing my photo on the page where the points of focus would converge with the points on the imaginary grid of the rule of thirds.

Glueing on strips of paper using 3M glue applicator

Then I glued the strips on using this awesome double-ended applicator glue tube from 3M.

These mini ink pads from Tim Holtz are new and oh so cute. They are designed to be just like the larger versions but more compact and portable. You can click them together to stack them up. Also available are new rounded mini blending tool and refill pads but I haven't splashed out on those yet so I can't show you what they look like. I can only tell you that they work better than the larger rectangle version (in my photo) because they don't leave the harsh edges when you're inking. I used some broken china ink and the mini black soot one to put some vignette edges around my photo and at the base of my layout on the corners of the blue card. 

I used the Marker Spritzer on the clouds to give some silver, grey, white or blue speckles to the various clouds. Some of the cut out cloud shapes were placed under a Tim Holtz Dot Fade Stencil and then Distress Paint applied over top to mask out some cloud areas in the background sky at the top of the page. Then I stamped with embossing ink and sprinkled on some clear embossing powder and used my heat gun to set the large star top right in the layout. Gem stickers were placed around the sky as stars. Clouds were layered on with dimensional tape.

Pocket Scrapbooking - Blank Journal Card pfffjazzled (new word - made that up!)

Pocket Scrapbooking with Blank Journal Cards

I know it kind of goes against the whole grain of the pocket scrapbooking ethos, to decorate your own journal cards. It kind of is putting the work back into something which is designed to take some of the work out of scrapbooking for those like myself who have zilch time. However I must confess to feeling excited when I saw that Blank Journal cards were available. In my last pocket project you saw I altered a ready-made card from the colours of it's theme to suit my spread. This time I have been able to totally make my own creation for a journal card and as a little mini project in itself just making the card was quite fun!

Blank Journal Cards from Becky Higgins Project Life.

Miss Crafter's journal and pencil case in the grass.

I started this journey in the grass outside my son's piano lesson where I have to wait for 45 mins and hence there is time to craft and no excuse not to. I bought along my pens and journal and some blank journal cards to decorate. This was my first experiement and imagine my dissapointment when I discovered my mini mister was missing from my pencil case! How was I going to wet the distress marker marks and get a lovely Tim Holtz effect? The school drinking fountain of course! The other mums may have thought I was nuts but who cares.

Wetting journal card distress ink with school fountain.

Using a Tim Holtz, Ranger stencil to add a layer of distress paint.

This stencil by Tim Holtz is called Schoolhouse and it's a good flexible one because it has alphabet and numbers.

Using the Scotties Pink heat gun to dry my stencilled paint.

Add ink to a Mini Mister using an eyedropper.

Couture Creations finger dauber adding distress ink.

Using another Tim Holtz stencil with the ink sprayed from a mister.

This stencil from Tim Holtz is called Dot Fade.

Finishing touches. Couture Creations stamps and Archival Ink.

Xyron Sticker Maker and Blank Journal Cards

Did you know a philatelist is not quite the term for a stamp collector it's more accurately used to describe a person who studies stamps. A philatelist may or may not also collect stamps. I was a bit of a stamp collector as a kid, a hobby picked up from my Dad. My Grandmother was one also and in the picture is a recently inherited box of some of her collection. I have two new aquisitions to my crafting arsenal this week, a Xyron Sticker Maker and some Becky Higgins Project Life blank journal cards. The stamps seemed like the perfect thing to turn back into stickers since they originally were! I love the idea of using some of these in scrapbook layouts.

Xyron Sticker Maker

Make your own stickers for your scrapbooking

The Xyron Sticker Maker is a nifty little gadget that allows you to make stickers out of ...well...things that aren't! I was dying to try it and this week I finally did. At first it took me a little while to figure out which way up to put things to get them to come out with the sticky on the correct side and that is why reading a craft blog will save you a few precious inches of your own sticker reel. You allow some other chimp to waste their stuff then tell you how to do it properly. There are very few instructions on the packet which is either because it is very simple or because it's made in China, I'm not sure which.

Basically you pop your item in facing up, pull it through by tugging out the paper at the other end,and tear it off the device.  Give the paper a bit of a rub to make sure it's adherred properly, remove the backing paper and stick to the object of your choice. Not much to it. The glue is non toxic and adjustable. 

The other object in my haul is a lovely thick stack of blank journal cards bought out by Becky Higgins for Project Life. Keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post more about those but I have to find the cable to get those pictures off a particular camera so for now you can see that I have used one here and the box can be seen in the background of this photo. I sprayed some ink on the journal card, stamped it with Kasiercraft's Now Boarding stamp and stuck on my newly created New Zealand stamp sticker and voila I have a self-made journal card for my pocket scrapbooking.

The ink I used to spray the card was Windsor and Newton which is artists ink that I have always loved because of the cute little pictures on the boxes but you could use Tim Holtz distress ink and a Mini Mister. (See my blog post I love my mini mister).

I also tried out making a sticker from a cut out butterfly from a piece of scrapbooking paper. I say tried because that was one of my early experiments where I got the thing the wrong way up but in theory this will work fine. I also experiemented with thicker objects like a felt flower I had cut out with the cuttlebug and a Sizzix die. You can see that in the background of the top photo stuck to my brown paper. Perhaps there are easier ways to stick felt to a layout but this did kind of work and I was impressed that I could put a thick object through the Xyron Sticker Maker.

The end result. A stamp sticker made using a Xyron Sticker Maker and a blank journal card decorated using inks and a Now Boarding stamp by Kaisercraft.

by Miss Crafter of Crafterlala