Distress Stain Backgrounds

Hello blog visitors, Kirsten here, happy Wednesday to you all.  My blog post for today has turned out to a mini tutorial that will be completed tomorrow.

I know from talking with the ladies at Lisa’s classes that they haven’t tried using Distress Stains yet, so I thought I’d show you a very simple way to create a background, using them & stamping.
Distress stains are ink-based, fluid dyes, they come in the same range of colours as the distress inks & they're great for adding colour to a porous surface quickly & easily.  I’ve chosen manila tags as my surface today, they’re an ideal size for trying out techniques.



First thing to do is put various colours of the stains on your craft sheet.  Inside the bottle is a valve which you open by pressing the brushed nylon dabber onto the sheet.  If you want more stain gently squeeze the sides of the bottle.




Swipe the tag through the stains.






Dry the tag for a few seconds with your heat tool, then spritz with water.  The stains react with the water & will blend with each other.  Dry thoroughly – you can also mop up the excess stain with a paper towel.






Once dry, you can press the tag into the remaining stain, this will give you a mottled effect, as in the tag on the right.  I used a second tag to mop the rest of the stain, thus the colour is less intense – don’t waste your stains!




As long as you remember to dry each layer, you can add more stain quite a few times.




The next layer to add is distress inks, which are translucent of course, so you’ll get extra colour while still seeing the stains underneath.




Now we’re ready to start stamping.  This is an Artemio stamp.  I didn’t put it on an acrylic block, because I didn’t want a perfectly clear image & I used Coffee Archival ink, that way the image becomes part of the background.   You can see that I applied more pressure when I stamped on to the first tag.




The next layer was a floral stamp from Kanba stamped in opposite corners with black ink.  I also flicked some water onto the darker tag to break up the darker areas.



The final step for the background was to add some solid stamping using black ink.  Unfortunately, none of the stamps I have from Lisa are solid images, so I used these little butterflies & dragonfly stamps from my stash.

       

That's it for today, I hope you’ll come back tomorrow to see how I finished these tags.  Until then, happy crafting.
Kirsten.