Ink blending mat

Well as referred to in my previous post I was inspired to use my ink blending mat this weekend. I don't really know why but I'd only seen the blending mat used with a brayer and for some reason didn't really think about what else to do with it, anyway somehow I ended up on the SpodgeAway website watching all the videos and I was like woah why didn't I think to look on the Internet before...!!! The one where he uses just black ink to create a whole scene is amazing!!

So I think I will definitely need some of those stenscapes and in the mean time I've ordered some Christmas stencils so hopefully they'll arrive next week to play with. So out came the distress inks (not that they're ever really away!) and I started experimenting.

The background on this card was my first try, blending a couple of colours and also applying ink through a stencil - the lines you can see are from the edge of the stencil, but not too bad I thought. I then stamped on the Paper Artsy stamp and used some more distress ink off the mat with a craft nib and some water to highlight the flowers. Then I tore out the paper and highlighted the edge with walnut stain and stuck it on to a card. I stamped on a sentiment and then also the flowers round the edge which were in the same paper artsy set, not sure about the sentiment think it's personal impressions. Finally I just accented the edge of the stamped image with a gold gel pen.

I love the colours on this one, I could use peacock feathers and picked raspberry on pretty much everything, I think there's a bit of evergreen bough in there as well, and Iced Spruce round the edge!! I again I blended the inks used cut n dry foam picking up the ink off the mat, it does seem to work much better than trying to go directly from the ink pad. I stamped on the tree, flowers and sentiment in black plus the other two in the same distress colours, and added a litter glitter to the black flower heads.

Before I stuck the main square down on the card I used the same distress inks through another section of the same stencil I was using before I think it's a crafters workshop one, to create circles in the background. The card itself is Craftwork cards and already came with the embossed edge on it.