Twisted Alcohol Background Technique

If you have not yet seen Tim Holtz's blog with his 12 Tags of Christmas, stop and visit his blog now. He is doing give aways along with the fabulous step-by-step demonstrations. The more new people who leave comments, the more he'll give away. So really, go visit his blog and leave a comment.

Today was Tim's second tag, and I fell in love with this background technique and the colors he choose for a winter tag. So I had to play!!! I have a few people that I need to send a special thank you to, and these Christmas cards will do nicely. Here is what I came up with.

Per Tim's instructions, I shook up the silver metallic mixative and dropped some onto a craft sheet. Then added a mixture of alcohol inks and then a good amount of blending solution.

I laid down a piece of glossy card stock, twisted it and picked up, the dropped it down again, twisted and picked up to cover the card stock. Then added more blending solution and repeated with a clean piece of glossy card stock. I had put so much of the silver metallic mixative down, that I ended up adding more alcohol ink and blending solution and kept going until I had quite a few pieces of card stock colored with this fun technique.

Here are the various backgrounds I got using this technique at one sitting. Make sure the backgrounds are dry before continuing.

I stamped an angel stamp with black Archival ink, added black embossing powder and heat set. Then stamped some stars with the black Archival ink. I later went back and added more of these stars.

Tim had a cool speckling brush to do this next step. I used the old splatter with the toothbrush (very messy, but it works). Just drop more silver metallic mixative onto the craft sheet. Pick up some with the toothbrush and use a finger to splatter it over the surface. The one on the left already has so much silver, that the splatters don't really show up. So you'll see the splatters better on the right one.

For contrast, Tim added white swirl rub-ons. I had these white snowflake stickers. I think they go well on my card.

I ran some some chipboard tags through the swirl Cuttlebug folder. Sponged on some blue Distress ink with a Jumbo Dauber. Ran the Distress ink over the top edges and stamped part of a saying on with black Archival ink.

I ran some white core black card stock through the snowflake Cuttlebug embossing folder and sanded the raised areas to reveal the white core.

To complete the card I darkened the side edges of the chipboard tag with black Archival ink and attached it with silver brads. I ran a silver leafing pen over the edges of the alcohol background and adhered it to the black snowflake paper. Added this beautiful metallic snowflake embellishment to the upper left corner. And layered onto a white card.