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

Gelli print mini

I had a fun afternoon printing pretty papers from my Gelli plate, using leaves from the garden as masks but at the end of it I had a stack of papers with no home to go to. This is turning out to be a common thing as I generally get carried away taking prints and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

By folding as simple accordion spine I could glue the pages into the folds until I ended up with a small journal.

An easy construction but now I've got a mini journal or Instagram album.

I added some pink duct tape around the spine to hold it all together and used some of the left over pieces of gelli print papers to die cut shapes. The sentiment on the front is from the Echo Park Capture Life kit.

 What will you make with your Gelli prints?



Jaine x

Sketch book project

 

At the end of May I'm lucky enough (or crazy enough, not sure which) to be going to Austria with my best friend on a week long hike of the Tyrolean mountains. Despite having to carry our stuff in our back packs (real hiking) there's just no way I'll be able to last the whole seven days without journaling it.

I decided the easiest and lightest way was just to purchase a small A6 size sketch book but it was just far too plain and crying out for a bit of a tart up.

An earlier Gelli Plate session had given me some great background fodder so I chose this piece which had an amazing retro feel to it. Just created with two Distress paint colours Peeled Paint and Salty Ocean and a Dina Wakley stencil from Ranger called Mod.

I had originally planned to do lots to this one but on seeing it peeled from the Gelli Plate I fell in love instantly and was reluctant to add anything at all to it.

So it became my starting point to cover my book. To add some detail and interest to my cover I used the Echo Park kit Capture Life which has some brilliant stickers and great papers to layer and also has it's own retro feel.

I think this and a couple of pens will be sufficient and should take up no space at all in my back pack even if I have to throw out something else like a pair of socks!

Jaine x