The Chalkboard Papercraft Technique - Do you know it?

Stampin' Up! demonstrators share the Chalk Board Technique tutorial 

I'm sharing the Chalkboard Technique today.  It's a fun and easy process and you don't need to be an expert papercraft technician to achieve some great results.   It's our theme set by Annette Elias our dutch demonstrator for the Totally Techniques Blog Hop this month.  

I've used Stampin' Up! sets Nature's Beauty,  Cup of Cheer dies that match the Cup of Christmas stamp set and also one of the two reward stamp sets from the Winter catalogue that you can earn with a qualifying spend.  It's called Greatest Part of Christmas and is a sentiment set perfect for the European market as well as the wider Stampin' Up! population.  

My first card above was simply done by positioning all but two of the sentiments from the Greatest Part of Christmas.  Firstly I swept, patted and smudged my embossing buddy across a piece of black card.  If you've not come across the embossing buddy before it's a little fabric pouch filled with powdery stuff or FU FU dust as we used to call it when I was in the Royal Navy.  It helps to stop excess embossing powder from sticking to your project where you don't want it as the natural oils in your skin leave mini  marks just by handling the card and the embossing powder has a habit of sticking to them.  The FU FU removes this and helps to just get embossing powder on the stamped image only.   

OK so now you know all about FU FU I can tell you that I patted it across the card to give the impression of chalk dust!  I then positioned my piece of card onto my Stamparatus (stamp positioning tool) to place the clean stamps face down to get them where I wanted and so that I could pick them up with the stamping plate of the tool.  The picture below shows this.   You might think ooh her card is too short, but I took the photo with a scrap after I'd finished the card.  By putting the stamps in place like this they will all stamp together and if a section wasn't ink well enough I can revisit it and improve the intensity of the images by adding more ink and placing the stamps down on the card again. 

Once the images were stamped I used a sponge to gently smudge the ink again to enhance the chalk dust look.  I added white baker's twine to the background before sticking this piece onto a piece of whisper white card with Stampin' dimensionals.  I added two candy canes decorated with holly and berries, all cut using the Stampin' Up! Cup of Cheer dies.  I raised the top cane using some of the new black Stampin' dimensionals from the Halloween section in the winter catalogue.  They are great for a project like this as they don't show on black or darker card if they peep out around the sides.  Some red rhinestones add an extra bit of sparkle.  

My second card was just as simple.  I cut a stitched label and used the embossing buddy again and then stamped the fox from the awesome Charity stamp set Nature's Beauty.  Stampin' Up! are donating £2.50 from the sale of every set to Mental Health UK so you get a fab stamp set and also donate to a good cause at the same time. 

One of the images is a super fox and I   stamped him with Versamark, added white embossing powder then heated it.  I then used the snow stamp from the same set and stamped around the fox with craft white pigment ink. I smudged it with the sponge and added a little more ink at the bottom to create the effect of the ground.  Before sticking it onto the matt layer I stamped in black ink the twiggy bushes across the layer and added the sentiment.  

To finish I added two frosted epoxy droplets and matted the whole project onto a thick white card base.  

As I said a very simple but effective technique and you can see a quick 2 minute video from the Stampin' Up! team HERE that shows these different effects. 

You can also see some more inspiration from all the other lovely global demonstrators on our blog hop by clicking on each thumbnail picture below.  

Thanks for stopping by and see you soon.

Zoe x

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