Exploratory Laminating

As my boys are away at their grandparents  for a few days I actually got to see my choice of programmes on the TV! What a treat! Today, I have had a few hours of watching the craft channel, 'Create & Craft', while I tackled my ironing mountain.

One of the programmes inspired me to make tonight's craft:.

A laminated inspirational postcard.

They were promoting a hot and cold laminator which looked quite useful, but I'm fine with just my hot laminator.  I was just looking for ideas to use it and they had quite a few.  One idea I loved was to add Tim Holtz's alcohol inks to the laminating paper, must try that some time. 

This idea, which I've tried, was to put embossing powder on your image before laminating it:

It kind of worked, but this red sparkly embossing powder went a bit pink.

Still, it's good to try new techniques and I am inspired to try other exploratory techniques with my laminator. 

Enjoy your Bank Holiday those of you in the UK,
See you tomorow,

qwiksave

Duvet Diary and Bookmarks

For todays project I recovered a new diary and made some bookmarks using the cover of my duvet!:


Not literally, lol! I photographed the duvet with all its interesting creases and crumples and uploaded the resulting image into an online photo editing program. I do recommend this program (called Picnik) as it is excellent for being creative with your photos and a good deal of it is free too. Using the 'Boost' control really helped bring out the beige and blue colours in the duvet. I then added the date (2010) using a Picnik fancy font, printed it out onto A4 plain paper and stuck it onto the diary.

This is a photo of the duvet (bought from Next a LONG time ago!) before:


The diary I used did have a nice image on it before I changed it - if you are a gardener that is! (and if you want one they are still available at the time of writing on a site called thelittledog) but I really like the decorative style of calligraphic script which is why I changed mine.

I then made the matching bookmarks out of the offcuts using a laminator, hole punch (Big Bite)and decorative ribbon.

All I need now is a fancy fountain pen and I'm all set up!