What’s The Fuss Layout with Shrink Plastic Embellishments

(This post is part of my Frosty Festivities 2015 Blog Event – see a list of all the posts HERE)

I’m sorry there was no post yesterday. My son’s ill, just a cough and a cold, but he’s been off school with it and waking up a lot during the night, so after a few exhausting days it was time for a day away from blogging! We spent yesterday recuperating and he’s doing a bit better today. So I’m back with another festive project for you, this time it’s a layout with some shrink plastic embellishments…

This page is about how my son didn’t really get what all the fuss was about in advance of Christmas 2013… he’s certainly excited for Xmas 2015 though!

Can you spot which ones are the shrink plastic embellishments? It’s the little line of trees on the journal card!

I made them using the Clearly Kelly ‘Noel’ stamp set. I figured they went well with my page, but I couldn’t stamp them straight onto the busy background, so I went looking for something else to stamp them onto:

I found a sheet of white shrink plastic (the brand I used was Shrinkles). I wanted to stamp a gold tree, but I didn’t have a good gold ink pad, so I tried colouring the image with a Metallic Gold pen from Staedtler, before stamping it onto the ROUGH side of the shrink plastic:

Note the green underneath the plastic – it’s a piece of felt which I used to try and give a better impression of the stamped image.

Unfortunately it didn’t come out that well the first time. But it wasn’t because the felt didn’t work – it was because the ink had dried too much on the side I’d coloured first – maybe because I had stopped to take a photo of the coloured-in stamp! Here’s what the first layer looked like:

I coloured the stamp just on the one side which needed more coverage, and stamped again on top of the first image:

It was slightly out of alignment but I decided I quite liked the effect!

I stamped the same tree again, using black StazOn ink (I didn’t end up using this tree on the layout):

Next I attempted to colour the stamp again, but I made a big mistake. I tried to use ProMarkers. Don’t do this! The stamped image was really faint and I stained my stamp. Lose-lose. Oh well, we live and learn:

I cleaned the stamp and used it again, with green pigment ink this time. But some of the pink ProMaker, which wouldn’t come off when I was cleaning the stamp, did come off on the stamped image:

Again I quite liked the accidental effect!

Finally I stamped the little tree using red pigment ink:

I cut out the four colourful trees and used Staedtler pencils to add some red and blue to the black tree:

Then I shrunk them in the oven according to the manufacturer instructions. Here’s how they looked when they came out – I left the colouring pencils in the photo so you can see how much they shrunk:

I decided the black, red, and blue one didn’t really match my page, but the others look really cute all lined up on the journal card:

Another thing I did on this page was to cut some stars from the background pattern to use on foam dots (I got the idea to do this from a card on the Basic Grey blog HERE):

When adding them back on to the layout I made sure they overlapped something on at least one edge, so they stand out as well as blending in!

The cream enamel dots and white painted wood veneers were added as an afterthought, as I decided the page looked too dark with all that wood.

Be Inspired:

Stamp some images then cut them out to use as embellishments

Cut an image from a background sheet to use at the front of the project too

Cut a photo or patterned paper piece so that it’s tall and skinny

Have you ever used shrink plastic to make embellishments before?

Remember that commenting on this post, and any post that goes live during November 2015, will count as another entry into the Grand Giveaway {NOW CLOSED}, but only if you’ve registered your interest in winning that prize right HERE!

I’ll be back tomorrow at 8am GMT with another sponsored giveaway!

Jennifer x