MARBLED CHALK

I love marbled papers. Don't you?

The other day I came across the directions to do something that I thought would turn out really GREAT, so I was anxious to give it a try immediately.

About the time Stampin' Up! retired their Stamping Pastels (chalks), I also retired mine. Never to give them another thought -- that is, until I came across this tutorial. So I dragged them out, dusted them off, and eagerly opened them.

The directions said to scrape chalks onto the surface of about a half inch of water. It suggested to try no more than two or three colors. Swirl it around a bit -- not too much, it said; otherwise the colors would blend and you'd lose the marbling effect.

I grabbed one of the old style Stampin' Up! wood mount stamp cases and added some water. I chose my favorite color combo -- pink, orange and yellow -- and used a craft knife to flake some of each of the colors onto the surface of the water. Quickly I picked up a popsicle stick and briefly swirled. It seemed like some of the color sank immediately to the bottom of the container, while some of it floated atop the surface of the water. Hmmm.

Being that I was going to dunk my paper into water, I decided to opt for using watercolor paper. I had cut a piece to 4" x 5 1/4". I laid it onto the surface and immediately and carefully pulled it straight up as the directions stated. Ewww.

Uh huh, the stuff that sank to the bottom barely made an appearance on the paper. I used my heat tool to hurry along the drying.

OK. Chalk that one up to beginner's UNluck. Pun intended.

Continuing to use watercolor paper and fresh color combinations, I attempted a few more:

OK. The directions hadn't stipulated which type of paper should be used in this project. So I set aside the watercolor paper, and brought out a piece of Naturals White cardstock. I gave that a try:

Oh my. Talk about hideous. Eh?

One that I hadn't shown you yet was a piece I decided to actually use in a card. I had attempted traditional fall colors on watercolor paper. But I was disappointed with the end result. I used it anyway:

I pulled out that ol' classic Lovely As A Tree set, and did some thumping on it to give it a more autumnal look. I had used a base of Old Olive and thumped on Cajun Craze, More Mustard (retired) and Pumpkin Pie. I also colored in the tree trunk with an Early Espresso Stampin' Write marker. 

I used one of the Labels Collection Framelits to cut out the tree image, then mounted it on top of a Cajun Craze leaf cut with the Autumn Accents Bigz die, popping everything up with Stampin' Dimensionals.

Well, that little Paper Seedling didn't flower too well. But, I thought it had been worth a try. Tell me what you think.

Marbled

Smiles.