April quintiles

 April's theme is April Fool - which absolutely floored me, until several people said that they had used jester or mask stamps. I don't have any of  these, so decided to just cut a mask shape out of black card and stamp a rather baroque floral stamp over it and emboss with gold EP. Then I needed a background - desperation ruled again, and I dug out my TH distress stains and very ancient Ranger Posh Rainbow inks. For the blue one I mainly used the distress stains in gold, brass, bronze and picket fence - the pinker one had a lot of the rainbow inks added and some fired brick distress paint as well round the edges- just splodged over the card and heavily spritzed with water. I wasn't sure if the inks would react horribly with the distress stains, but they didn't.

They looked ok, but a little plain when they eventually dried - then I remembered that I had some TH tissue wrap untouched in the packet, so dug that out and glued over the card using some aqua glass varnish from an old Graphicus lucky dip box (also previously untouched!). This stuff was originally for serviette technique, according to the label - worked fine on tissue wrap, and made a much more subtle background from my splodges.
Am not too happy with these, so will hang on to them for a couple of days, just in case inspiration strikes - you never know what may surface from the combined process of clearing out the rubbish and finally putting workshop stuff away!