Simple Masking Ideas

Hello

You know those times when no matter how hard you paddle, you get nowhere?  That's my crafting life at the moment!  Never mind, I'll keep at it and hopefuly work through the pain barrier hahaha

The biggest fly-in-the-ointment just now is that I'm trying to get to grips with my new Go Press and Foil machine, but I'm struggling, and wasting a lot of time in my attempts to get results I can actually use.  Hopefully one day I'll get there and can start sharing projects using the hot foils.  

I'm telling you this because one of the plans I had for this week's Daring Cardmakers challenge was to foil a design over my masked circles background.  But it didn't work so I ended up die-cutting the images instead.  It was such a good idea, too!  I'll have to try it again when I've sussed it all out.  Wondering now whether the foil doesn't like my regular card-stock - which is smooth white 300 or 350 gsm, maybe it needs a rougher surface to 'key' into? Have you got the machine, if so what do you think? And which die cut/embossing machine are you using?  I'd be really interested to know.

This week it's me, Nat, setting the challenge and I've been inspired by one of the techniques I fell in love with while trying to tackle my Christmas card production backlog last year:
Masking   
I'd like to see you use masking techniques on your card, whether with masking tape, post-it notes, masking paper or masking fluid - or even some completely new-to-me medium!

It's such a fun technique for stamping, creating DIY backgrounds with ink blending, using die-cuts from masking paper, and many more looks.
Click the link to see the projects the design team created:

One of the wonderful things about our design team s that we have a wide range of skills, talents and styles, and some incredibly clever 'inky' types - I'm not one of these, so knew I needed to find an easy option!

In the end I made two cards using different masking ideas

For the first one I masked off a horizontal area across the middle of my card with masking tape then used a stars stencil and lots of different inks. When that was dry I used more masking tape to leave narrow borders at the top and bottom of the white area, then filled the borders with dark blue ink

Info:

Stars stencil; Imagination Crafts

Plain nested stars die set; Tonic

Smaller, fancy stars; Spellbinders (Superstars  Die D-Lites Etched Dies) 

Sentiment;  Spellbinders (Die D-Lites Sentiments 3 Etched Dies)

Smooth white card blank, edge inked with aqua ink

Bazzill white card for upper layer

Other card; plain Royal Blue, Silver, plain white for inking using various Versa inks

My second card is the one that should have had some gold foiling for the background, in the end I used the same dies, but in the normal die-cutting way

For this background I started by die cutting the different sized circles from all-over sticky sticky notes, which are just fab for this sort of thing.  If you've not seen them, imagine a Post-it note where the amount of sticky to plain paper are reversed and you'll get the idea.  By die cutting the circles into the sticky note I created both a mask and a stencil, and I used both to create the circles background for my card

Info:

Smooth white card blank plus extra for inked panel

Various scraps of Bazzill card, Gold card 

Aqua and Turquoise inks

For creating masks/stencil; Spellbinders Nestabilities Standard Circles SM Etched Dies 

Pineapple and Palm leaf from: Tropics Wild & Free by Debi Adams Spellbinders Shapeabilities  Etched Dies

 

Simply Said Phrase Set 2  Shapeablitlites  Etched Dies 

(Hooray, Thank you, Celebrate, Hello, For You)

The Sticky note method makes it easy to create the overlapped effect so I think I'll try it out with some of my other nested dies and maybe some image die cuts.  That pineapple shape for instance would work brilliantly for a tropical or fruity sort of background.  Might have to use that die set for another card!

So that's me for today, at last, you say......

Check out The Daring Cardmakers HERE. 

WIN my Blog Candy - a lovely Spellbinders Poppies die set HERE