The 12 Brands of Christmas - Brand #6 - Gelli Plate

If you're wondering what Christmas gift you can give to yourself this year, how about treating yourself to a Gelli Plate?  Not sure if it's for you?  There's a great video here at A Sprinkle of Imagination which shows you the basics, and you can find many more videos on YouTube.

The plates come in a variety of sizes, but if you just want to dip your toe into the water of Gelli printing, you could go for one of the smaller plates.  I like the 6x6" plate, which I find useful for creating card-sized backgrounds, and the baby-sized 3x5" plate.

With most of the plates, you take your paper or card to the plate, but the advantage of the 3x5" plate is that you can take the plate to your paper or card, just like you would with a stamp.  Simply attach your Gelli plate to an acrylic block, brayer paints onto the plate, remove some of the paint in a pattern, then stamp it onto your card.  Add a second layer of colour/s to the plate and repeat.  Keep going for as long as you're happy.

You can create a masterboard by covering an A4 sheet then cutting it to size, or you can trim your blank card first and work on the smaller pieces.  Here, I cut some A4 sheets into four and worked on each piece separately using the 3x5" plate.  (The piece, top right, is where I brayered off all the excess ink.  That will get used as a background in a future project too.)

I took the piece in the centre then added some stamping and stencilling, and it's ready to be trimmed and go onto a card.

You can make marks using stencils, brushes, or any soft blunt object that won't damage the surface of the Gelli plate.  Fabric, textured ribbon, punchinella and lace also give fantastic results.

Here's a card with a background made with the 6x6" Gelli plate, lace and textured ribbon.

You can find Gelli plates here, and brayers here.  You can use any acrylic paints, from expensive down to children's craft paints from the supermarket.  All behave slightly differently and give different results, but that's the fun of it!  Go on, release your inner child!

Happy Christmas Crafting!
Shirley x