Heating it up for the Funkie Junkie blog!

 Suzz is hosting the latest Funkie Junkie blog challenge, and she's calling it "It's Heating Up!"  Here's her description: 

July is when the weather here in the Midwest really starts to turn warm and muggy. This is the inspiration for our challenge to interpret the heat with using one or more of the following colors: Yellow, Red or Orange. Your challenge is to create a vintage or shabby chic project where the main color is yellow, orange or red. I can't wait to see how you turn up the heat in your art!

I had several ideas, but settled on using alcohol inks on embossed foil, a technique I have used in the past several times.  With the new Gunmetal and Rose Gold mixatives now available, I was curious to see how well they played with the regular alcohol inks.  

I chose two older Alterations embossing folders from Tim Holtz - one a flourish and the other a damask pattern. 

Although I love the warmer colors, I don't often use them exclusively, so I set myself a challenge to do so, allowing only the mixatives to play along.   I'd had a play a few days ago using only two yellows, and only two reds on embossed foil using the Kaleidoscope 3D folder - although pretty, the inks did not yield the color blending I was looking for. 

So this time, in addition to the gunmetal and rose gold, I selected Honeycomb, Raspberry, Poppyfield, and Valencia Orange, hoping that I could get some lovely blends when the inks meet under the influence of blending solution.

To start, I covered some 110 pound cardstock with foil tape.  I use the kind of tape made to repair heating/air conditioning ducts, as I have leftovers from such a project in Connecticut.  But Ranger also makes foil tape sheets, which Linda carries at the Funkie Junkie Boutique, which are generously sized and somewhat easier to apply, therefore.  Don't worry about wrinkles as these will iron out once embossed.  Once the foiled card is embossed, it looks like this (pardon my reflection - I have roof windows in my studio which make it hard to photograph anything with my poor skills, lol!)

I colored this pattern with lots of the Raspberry and Poppyfields, with a bit of the orange; in the heat of the moment, I did not capture that on my phone.  Then I added a bunch (too much) of the Rose Gold,  I found that the Rose Gold mixative looked very silver and was covering up the colors.  I put a generous amount of blending solution on, and essentially dripped off most of the Rose Gold.  This reaction surprised me, because in an earlier make several years past, I used the regular gold mixative, and it seemed to sink below the colors, only to emerge once things dried, as you can see here.  (This is the Anna Griffin Acanthus folder).

 The silver in the photo of the finished damask card front is the Rose Gold.  The lighter, colored bits are Valencia Orange and Honeycomb.  I shall definitely have another go with this mixative - I think I probably had too much ink on the surface for it to do anything but float on top.

On the flourish card, I went much lighter on using the Poppyfield, as it tends to override the yellow and orange.  Here, I used the Gun Metal mixative, again with a much lighter hand.  It shows just along the spine of the flourish.  But you can see much more of the Honeycomb and Valencia Orange here.  You can also see in this extreme closeup the seams of my tape - another reason to use the foil sheets!  

I finished the cards by attaching to regular card bases, with heat embossed sentiment die cuts from Gina K.  

The "Hugs" is embossed in several layers with Ranger's Liquid Platinum, about which I learned from Butterfly.  The "Just Because" has about 4 different layers of various embossing powders - I couldn't get anything I liked, and ended up with final layers of Ranger's Snowflake Tinsel over layers of liquid platinum and black sparkle.

Thanks so much for hanging in there with me - and please do leave a comment, as I love hearing from you!  I am entering this into the Funkie Junkie "It's Heating Up!" challenge.