Treasured Memories Projects & Techneeks: Techneek of the Week

Last week I showed you how to use Metallic Alcohol Ink to jazz up your chipboard. This week I am going to show you a basic way to use regular alcohol ink to colour your acrylic shapes.

First and foremost you need to protect your work surface. I save all of my Treasured Memories paper bags for this purpose, but you can use newsprint, cardboard, whatever you have laying around that you don't mind getting ink all over! You might also want to think about protecting your clothes...alcohol ink will stain.

After you've got the boring part taken care of, you can choose the colour of ink and the plastic shape to use. Let's start with only one colour...then next week I can show you how to use multiple colours on one project!! Oooh..aah!

I chose Stream alcohol ink, by Ranger. We carry this line in the store, and it comes in a multitude of colours, as shown in the last Techneek post.

I chose the Pageframe Designs acrylic photo corner for my shape. This company makes a variety of shapes, including butterflies and stars, and also carries clear frames for displaying your favourite layouts! You could also try this on Heidi Swapp ghost shapes and letters, and Build-A-Book clear albums. Or try punching or die-cutting your own shapes out of transparencies!

Remember to peel off the protective layer from both sides of the clear shape.

Start applying your alcohol ink. The more you apply, the stronger the colour will be. You can apply it directly from the bottle, using the dropper tip.

Once you've got some ink on the shape, lift it up and tilt it to move the ink around. This way you won't have to apply as much ink, a lot of which is wasted if it leaks off the sides.

Keep applying more ink and tilting the shape until you get the coverage you want. If you want it to be darker, wait until this first coat has finished drying before you apply more ink. Alcohol ink does this funny thing if you apply a drop on an area that is still wet...it pushes the original colour out of the way and leaves bare spaces where once there was colour.

This is the finished product, after only one coat.

Once it dried, I used it directly on my layout. You can adhere the shapes down with glue dots, liquid glue, etc...anything that is "clear", and because you have applied colour to the once-clear shape, you won't see much of the adhesive underneath! I recommend adhering the shape with the coloured side down...that way you don't notice the inherent imperfections in the inked side, and it just looks like a shiny, coloured shape...like you bought it that way!!

Check back on Saturday for the next Project: a very cool Kaiser Crafts wooden tag album!!