Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers challenge #122 - Fantasy

Edna's been having fantasies - oooer!

I think she may have had a sip or two too much Tizer! Anyway, that mans that our new challenge at the Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers is Fantasy. So whether your fantasies are about fairies, dragons, unicorns, five minutes to yourself or something that might get you banned from Blogger, we want to know about it! And of course we love snark, so if you could chuck a bit of that in too we'd be eternally grateful.

Inspired by Edna, I dug out a silhouette fairy stamp. Now, fairies are so much not my thing that the fact I decided to use it could count as snark in itself, and yet I ended up getting so carried away I made TWO cards.

I used Stazon ink to stamp my fairy onto glossy card and then used encaustic painting techniques ( If you'd like to learn more about encaustic painting, there's a wealth of info and inspiration at https://encaustic.com/ ) to create fantasy scenery around her. I always get a bit carried away when I get my waxes out - hence the pair of cards. I might loathe ironing - but I love doing it with wax!

Each image has the fairy stamped with Stazon ink onto glossy card before setting to with the iron. I use a mini travel iron, although Arts Encaustic sells irons specially made for the purpose. The only difference seems to be that they are prettier. The iron MUST be one with an unbroken smooth sole plate, not a steam iron with holes in the base. Oh, and one you never, EVER intend to use for clothes again.  I also have a very old ironing board that I keep solely for this craft. If you use your normal one, you need to protect it with lots of newspaper or scrap paper, otherwise you will start finding wax spots all over your clothes.

To create the design, I started by covering the centre section of the base of the iron with clear wax, then added other colours going out towards the edges, and swooped it the whole height of the card in a single movement.  All the waxes I chose were ones that didn't have any white pigment in them  - the white pigment is opaque and obscures the stamping, so white, pink and other pastel waxes don't work when painting over stamped images. Then I used curved horizontal swoops to create "hills" and tapped the card against the base of the iron, pulling it away sharply, to create suction patterns that look like foliage. For each of these, I added more wax to the iron as necessary. I dragged some of the wax up from near the bottom of the card, using the edge of the iron, to create the tall grasses and finally used the very tip of the iron to add red wax "flowers" to the green and gold card. When each picture had cooled, I used a soft tissue to polish the wax to a high gloss.

For the square card I simply die cut my finished piece and added an Idea-ology Small Talk sentiment sticker. For the rectangular card I sponged  yellow and orange inks over an aperture card, mounted my wax piece behind the aperture and added one of the sentiment stickers plus some flowers to pick up the colours from the wax. Those flowers are absolutely NOT there to hide a blooper made while I was outlining the aperture in black. Oh indeedy-no they are not!

I am sharing these with

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