doing different

Yesterday was our monthly crafty session at Moira's, and we were all very glad of the heater glowing in the corner as it was a very dull and dank day, though it didn't actually rain.
Moira had found a new to us technique involving alcohol inks and laminating folders  - splashes of inks on the inside of the folder, add gilding flakes, close up and run through the laminator. Stamp a flower stamp with versamark and emboss with black EP on the resulting plastic sheet, flatten quickly with a block, then cut out the flowers and arrange round a diecut stamped sentiment.
Quite simple - until I tried it! Everyone else produced a perfect mixed multicoloured sheet - I got a streaky inky mess..............which looked like a rather lurid underwater scene to my rather desperate eyes. Moira produced a sheet of fish peeloffs,

 and I stuck 2 of the fish onto white card, coloured with promarkers, cut out and glued onto the more underwatery bit of the piece of plastic, along with 3 bits of waterweedy peeloff at the bottom. the fish was coated with dazzling diamonds, which I later regretted, as they took ages to dry........
the card on the right is more what I should have done .
I dug out my inks when I got home - or rather the 4 that I could find - a laminating folder and got going. I added mica powders as well as gilding flakes - it took 3 tries with different laminating sheets to get something approaching a decent result - obviously some makes work better than others, as on 2 of them the inks just slid off the plastic. I used an orphan Chocolate Baroque stamp for the flower, and the EP is a mix of odds and ends of blue and green - sentiment is a Clarity stamp of Moira's. Base card is white pearlescent, mat is vanilla, which doesn't show up too well on the scan, as I had to adjust the colours to get the flowers to look reasonably true.                                                            

 The remaining 2 cards did come out rather more as they should have - apart from me using white EP on grey card rather than black on white card, with the addition of white craft ink on the second card.
Sorry for the squiffy scans, I gave up after I had carefully lined them up with the edge of the scanner 5 times and still got a crooked image............
allium stamp is another Clarity one.
Moira promised to blog her originals soon, so I will be able to see how different my home version turned out.............it's not a technique I will be using a lot, it took ages to clean the rollers of the laminator!