Altered Brides(?!)

Sounds like that should be a headline for one of those weekly papers that you see as you go through the checkout line rather than a stamping blog post title. LOL! Caught your attention though, didn't it. ;-)

Quite a while back I posted that I'd seen a couple of new colors of Brides flowers at Michaels, pink and blue. I managed not to buy those, figuring that I could color my own cream and ivory flowers whatever color I wanted. I didn't need buckets of those single colors. Then the other day I heard that they also had black/silvery ones. Yikes! That was tempting! Fortunately my M's didn't have them. Okay, let's be honest--two of my M's didn't have them. Whew! Saved from an impulse buy, though I did have a couple of 50% off coupons.

Now I'd not gotten around to coloring any flowers. The ivory and cream colors were working fine for what I was making. But the subject has come up again over at the Gingerwood stamping forum. Susan mentioned alcohol inks as a way to color them. Today, di chimed in that she'd stamped some with text using India Ink and that they turned out fabulous. I had to pull mine out and try altering them.


Here are my altered Brides. The one in the top left corner is an unaltered Brides flower, aka table confetti. For those who haven't seen these, they have a pearlescent sheen and are embossed. Very pretty as is, which is why I hadn't felt compelled to do anything to them. At least I hadn't until today.


This is a closer view. I didn't end up using alcohol inks for these. I used my Memento dye inks. They are very fast drying and I love the colors! I just tapped the pad directly on the flower to color the whole thing. On some of them I stamped the flower's center. I used swirl stamps and dot stamps, text stamps and flower stamps. So many possibilities!


Another close up view of the flowers--I was trying to catch the sheen. The black ink was Archival black ink. The white is the new Adirondack snow cap pigment ink.


One more view because you can see some of the pearlescent sheen, particularly on the reddish flower. What I really like about using the Memento ink is the fact that it colored the flower but preserved the sheen. There's a light blue flower with the darker flower stamped on it. I'd colored that one with chalk ink, and as expected, it has a more muted, matte look. The pigment ink for the text was also thick enough that the flower lost that pearlescent look where the words were stamped, but it did make the text stand out a bit more, so that worked out fine.

So yay! Brides flowers can be colored and stamped on in lots of fun ways! Now I don't have to feel like I need to go out and buy any new colors. Woo hoo! The only problem is that I now realize that there are some colors of Memento pads that I would really like to have. LOL!