Bleach

Evening All,

Well it looks like blink and you missed the sunny weather. We are definitely back to cold and dreary, here at least. Still at least it's not snowing...........yet.

Todays cards, and there are lots of them, have been created using one of my all time favourite techniques, and it's so cheap and easy too. Good old fashioned BLEACH.

I do find that cheap thin bleach works best for this.

You need a stamped and embossed image to colour in. The heat embossing acts as a natural resist and allows the bleach to stay within the lines, unless you add too much that is.

Any image that you can colour works for this technique so I have chosen some lovely floral images with nice open flowers, just right for colouring.

You do have to be choosy with cardstock since not all card will bleach, so it's like doing your patch test for hair dye. Apply a little bleach to the corner of the card and see if it changes colour. Applying heat can often help and you are sometimes rewarded with some surprising results. I have blue card that bleaches out to a beautiful pink.

Another way of using bleach is to stamp with it as in the background of this card.

You need to create a stamp pad using several layers of kitchen paper or a piece of Cut'n Dry felt.

Add bleach to the pad and use it with your stamps like you would any ink pad.

You can use any of your stamps, but the one thing I can't stress enough is that you MUST clean your stamps after using them with bleach.

I've got stamps that are still perfectly OK even after 20 years because I cleaned them straight after using them with bleach. Normally, as any of my crafty pals will tell you, I vary rarely clean my stamps. If it's good enough for Tim Holtz then it's good enough for me.

Bleach is useful for removing the colour from dark cardstock so that you can then paint the image with colours that will show up.

Bleach will even work with alcohol inked backgrounds although I found that I usually had to heat it and for some reason it usually turns green.

I'm sorry for the rather picture heavy post, but as you can see I do rather like this technique.

Thanks for stopping by.

Stay safe and hugs

Kimx