Getting together with a new friend

Kathy and I belong to the same Yahoo group, which includes creative people from the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and Holland.  So what are the odds that both Kathy and I live in Georgia?  But we do - and we decided that we needed to have a face to face meeting to compare art, techniques, and thoughts about everything else in general and nothing in particular.  She arrived bearing gifts - a gorgrous blooming plant which is decorating my porch as we speak.  Then we settled down to business:  the business of crafts.  We started working on some of the faux metal tuts that are a challenge for our group this month.

Kathy (or SoKat to us) works on the embossing powder version.  We discovered that (1) this version uses a LOT of embossing powder; and (2) Kathy's heat gun is much hotter and faster than mine.

This is a solid gold card!  At least, it looks like it at this point.  My first try with a leaf stamp did not make a very deep impression.  Then, I had limited success with an off green Ranger embossing powder that I wanted to try.  It did not want to set up properly; but that was the whole point of our experiments - to find out what worked and what didn't.  This didn't.

Kathy made some gorgeous card with bronze-colored powder.  We both had problems with larger stamps getting them to emboss completely.  One side would emboss, and the other wouldn't.

Here are the results of our experiment with the bleach tutorial.  It was amazing how different types of cardstock reacted to the bleach.  We also had different results with using more and less bleach on the stamps.  So many variations!  So much fun!

No pics for our try with the embossing folder method, but this was also a learning experience.  I used a metallic acrylic ink on mine and Kat used Ceramicoat.  I got pretty nice results with light sanding; but SoKat decimated a piece of sandpaper and didn't get the same type of results at all with the heavier Ceramacoat.  We were successful embossing a piece of cardstock using a heavy rolling pin.  Now I'm wondering if you couldn't just use a much lighter weight paper - even commen copier paper - with the rolling pin.  You probably could not sand as heavily; but you might not need to.  Worth experimenting with!

So here we are at the end of the day - tired but happy and both eager to get together again and try some new things.  So many techniques, so many ideas - - so little time!  Thanks for a great day, Kathy!