Hi, Mandy here.
I've made myself a 'Colour Swatch Book' for my new collection of Tim Holtz Alcohol Inks, using a CD holder...
I was really blessed to get several bottles of alcohol ink from ebay as a birthday present (I am a very lucky girl). They came in sets of three with names like 'Rustic Lodge' & 'Tuscan Garden' . I decided to make a 'swatch' of the inks because it's a bit hard to tell from the bottle, or their names, what the colour looks like exactly (take 'mushroom' for example!?!) I'm also keen on inking onto see-through acetate at the moment to make my own scrapbook embellishments, so I wanted to know the exact colour when it's see-through. This needed to be a really simple system, nothing fancy, so my swatch pages look like this...
The pages are made from CD envelopes. First off I dabbed an ink swatch onto the outside of the see-through plastic envelope. I wrote the name of the ink onto a piece of white paper & slipped it into the envelope together with the name of the set of inks (the above set is 'Cottage Path'). Then I inked a 'Rummikub' tile which are cream not white. Into the back of the CD envelope I am going to store the felt pads for each colour...
Next I used my cropodile to punch each page in the top left corner & threaded the pages onto a large jump ring. I want to be able to swivel the pages to compare the colours from different sets...
The cover of the CD book was black fabric and I wanted to somehow use alcohol inks to decorate it. Well, I had already been playing about with the inks, seeing how they looked on metal & had made the sample below. It's made from a flattened out aluminium drinks can.
As you might expect it was extremely sharp as I was cutting it out but I do like the effect. So, for the book cover I cut out a heart shape and decided to sew it to the cover by punching a few holes with my cropodile...
...and setting eyelets into the holes. I then used embroidery floss to sew the heart on...
Next, I wanted to have a title on the book saying 'Alcohol Ink' but I'd already rejected the idea of stamping letters onto the inked metal because it didn't show up very well when I tried it (even with my fave black STAZON ink). So I thought about sewing letter beads onto the cover, which actually ended up threaded onto wire, hanging from the jump ring. I coloured the white letter beads with some matching alcohol ink holding them with tweezers...
I used some old Making Memories turquoise wire & threaded up the letters with other glass beads...
Here's a close up of the hanging beads and ribbon tied to the jump ring...
I'm know I will use this colour swatch book and I tell you what....alcohol inks are fabulous fun!
Bye now,
Mandy.