A Chipboard Tutorial for Blue Fern Studios

I'm up on the Blue Fern Studios blog today with a tutorial about using those little bits of chipboard you might normally recycle.

I don't know about you, but as soon as I get an order of chipboard, I tend to punch out the little extra bits of chipboard. The pieces that I don't think will find use as design features on a one of my projects I put into a Ziploc bag to be used to add height in my layering later on. Those that I feel I will use go into another bag. But recently I've started looking at those castoff pieces in a different light, as parts of a whole.

Take the Garden Window set.

You might normally punch out the flourishes and set them aside (I did), but they make wonderful additional details to your piece.

If you are planning on reassembling your chipboard pieces, you want to be sure to use media that will just coat the top of the piece and not cause the sides to change dimension. For this reason I chose to use embossing enamel rather than paint.

I prefer my embossing ink in a dabber so that I have better control of where it goes (using either the dabber top or by removing the top and painting the ink on).

Cover your main piece with one colour of embossing enamel and heat emboss.

The white is pretty stark, so once it had cooled I went in with several colours of chalk ink to add some depth, making sure to heat set each colour before I added the next.

 I then heat embossed the insert pieces in a different colour of embossing enamel.

Here's what the finished piece looks like:

And my layout:

Some closeups:

From the Heart Set, misted.

A piece from the Shabby Brick Panel, treated in the same way as the Garden Window.

I love the shutters that go with the Garden Window - they seem very Old World to me. I've added the sprigs from the All Natural Set, treated with the same colour embossing enamel as the punch outs for some continuity and to give the impression of a window box. The "Click" is from the Picture Perfect Set.

The masking on the Parlour paper from Blue Fern Garden was done using Ceramic Stucco, which gives amazing texture and accepts other media beautifully - I coloured mine with mists and chalk ink.

I love the way chipboard pieces add so much interest to your flower clusters.

Thanks for stopping by today. I hope that you'll start looking at those little throwaway bits of chipboard in a new light!