Distress Oxide Thank You cards with Erica

Hello, it’s the birthday girl Erica on the blog today! Happy birthday to me, I’m 25 today, whoop whoop!! Admittedly, it’s something like the 13th time I’m 25 but honestly, who’s counting? I’m not one of these ‘let’s grow old gracefully’ kind of gals, nope, not me. Kicking and screaming is more my style. And when that fails, denial. Oh, and then drown my sorrows in cake! I have never denied being a bit of a drama queen when it comes to ageing.

The birthday cards and presents have been trickling in for a little while so I thought I’d best make some thank you cards to send out to people for making me feel special. One of my early birthday presents from my sweet husband was the full set of Distress Oxide inks and I decided to try some of these out for today’s cards.

The Distress Oxides are super smooth and so easy to ink blend (which I will most likely be doing on a card in the near future) but I thought I’d try some easy ink smooching on both white and black card stock to see how it came out. I did watch some tutorials by Tim Holt himself before I started because to be honest, I kinda had the ‘need the full set syndrome’ before even having tried a single one and told The Man who prompted me to get them. Which I did right away as the dutiful and obedient wife that I am….*I nearly managed to write that without falling off my chair laughing, lol*

Anyway… *still snickering to myself*… I picked out Fossilized Amber, Spiced Marmalade and Fired Brick as my colour combination. These I rubbed directly onto my craft mat and then spritzed some water on it to ‘activate’ the oxide process. Then it was a simple-ish procedure of putting a piece of card stock down on top, smooch-smooch-smooch and flip over. I used my heat tool to help the drying process along and watched the magic. My first piece was white card stock and it looked amazing!

Moving on to the black card stock, I did the same thing in the same ink puddle. This didn’t work out as great. In hindsight, I should have started from scratch with this one too but, not one to give up, I dried it with the heat tool. Once it was dry, it had a really unique and fun pattern on it so I decided to use it anyway. Next time I will use less water and more ink on dark card stock though.

As these were going to be thank you cards, I grabbed the ‘Mini Thank You’ stamp set which has been a freebie with qualifying orders but will be released on its own in June. On the black card I decided to heat emboss it in white to make it stand out, I thought just stamping it with white ink might make it disappear. Before I stamped it with VersaMark ink, I sprinkled the card base with my anti-static tool to avoid those pesky stray bits of embossing powder sticking where I didn’t want them. On the bright coloured card I decided to go with black ink and not heat emboss it. When I look at it now, I think I should have said yes to heat embossing on this one too but you know, you live and learn.

Even with the fun backgrounds I thought the cards looked a bit plain. What’s that? Me? A sequin addict?? Where is that coming from?! *erm, totally guilty* So, yeah, it should come as about ZERO surprise that I grabbed some sequins to add some pizazz to these cards. One of my favourite fusions is the Crystal Rainbow mix and I got out some yellow, orange and hot pink ones in different sizes. These I added in a ‘meteorite shower’ kind of pattern across the card, yellow sequins on the yellow ink, orange sequins on the orange ink and hot pink ones over the red ink.

These cards are actually quite quick to make, especially once you get the hang of the Distress Oxides and how much water to add etc. They are even quicker when you don’t stop and faff as much as I sometimes do whilst making a card!

If you take the plunge and get these inks, take some time to get to grips with them and play around. You never know what might come out of it, and having ready made backgrounds are always a time-saver for those times you need to make a card in record time.

Well, that’s it for me for today, I’m off to celebrate the rest of my birthday with The Man and The Cheeky Chicas. And most likely a big piece of cake or four, since birthday calories don’t count.

Happy crafting from Erica

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