Just before I headed off to Vancouver to see my brother I went to a four-day scrapbooking retreat at The Wilds. The Paperie hosts these twice a year and they are a must-do! I admit, I planned my trip around it!

I was actually super productive this time around, something that usually doesn’t happen for me and to be honest, I don’t really care. For me, it’s more about the break and having an awesome girls weekend while doing something we all love! To get lots done this time was a huge bonus!

Two of my favourite LO’s came about due to a challenge I took part in. I used a couple of Halloween pics so I’m going to share these now before we get too far past that time and into full-blown Christmas!

I bought some foam Thicker words at the Retreat and they were perfect for these LO’s:

To make both LO’s, I picked three different colours of Distress Ink and blended them to get an ombre look, starting with the lightest and working my way up. I used the small round ink blending tool from Ranger, I like it better than the large one, and went over the colours a lot to get a seamless and smooth colour blend. I find that if you start light and keep adding colour, you are less likely to get lines from both the tool and between colours. If you look carefully, it seems that I have more than three colours on the page but that’s because of the overlap while blending.

To get the shimmery, bleached out dots I simply sprayed Biscotti Perfect Pearls Mist in my hand, flicked it onto the background and after a few seconds, rolled my paper towels over the top to pick up the excess mist.

I used the exact same technique for Gabe’s picture, with cool  colours instead of warm.

For the stars on both pages I used either diecut cardstock stars or wood veneer. I covered them with VersaMark and then sprinkled on Aged Silver Embossing Enamel from Stampendous. It’s the best antique silvery colour and is my fave lately, along with the Aged Gold.

Distress Ink techniques are by far my favourite – these inks can seriously do almost anything, I think they have magic powers! Let me know if you try this out and have another fun technique to share with me, I’m always looking for new ones!

Cheers!

S.