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How to live with my disabilities as an artist.

CAS card - letterpress at home

 Have you ever received a fancy card with letterpress type?

With letterpress, the paper is textured and you can literally see the printing process. It denotes an important and special feel to the card. Letterpress is officially done at a printers; but I have a trick to make a faux letterpress card. 

This trick is actually multi-step, requiring agile fingers and patience. I will show you a tip to make it go smoother. It took me several tries to figure it out but I am happy to pass it along. But first:

 Supplies

• White cardstock
• Altenew Butterfly Dreams layering stamp set
• Altenew Fancy Hello Die
• Altenew fresh dye ink sets in Golden Sunset and Sweet Dreams
• Die cutting machine
• Spray adhesive
• Vellum

1. The first thing you will do is die cut five fancy hellos from card stock.
2. Then you glue each fancy hello on top of each other, making one thick fancy hello. For me, this was harder than it sounds. I have neuropathy in my non dominant hand and this creates numb fingertips and lack of dexterity in that hand. Usually it does not interfere with my art, but this stacking of such delicate die cuts was frustrating. Until I figured out a way to make it easier. Take two sewing needles and stick 
   
   them into something softly solid. Then line up the die cuts using the needles as guides (see photo). Letting the die cuts fall onto the other dies, with the two needles holding them still, allows you to fuss and get them exactly lined up. Voila! I got this idea after many failed attempts of glueing 5 hellos onto each other and then printing (step 5) with them. Since those were not lined up as well, they created a fuzzy mess of a hello on my card. 
3. Die cut a fancy hello out of vellum and stick that to the bottom of your five glued-together hellos. So, now it is six layers, and the bottom layer is ink resistant.
4. Ink the bottom of the hello (onto vellum side) and then carefully situate onto the card where you want it to rest. 
5. Now run that through your die cutting machine (you will probably have to fuss with the number of layers of plates you put on the stack). Your card is now imprinted with the fancy hello and it is pressed into the paper making an indent in the paper. Faux letterpress.
6. Now the fun part - stamping and playing with colors. Using my Butterfly Dreams layering stamp set, I stamped three butterflies. I used the two sets of mini cubes in yellows and teals. You know I could not resist and several times combined more than one color in inking the same stamp. 
7. With my butterflies flying happily, I used those same ink cubes to make irregular splatters of color on the card front. To do this, I pressed a brush onto an ink cube. I transferred the color to a palette. Then I sprayed water onto the ink and made the ink watery; so I could pick it up it with my brush and splatter the watery ink onto my card.

I like the look of this card, I am glad to know this technique. Stay tuned and I will show you other card making techniques that create interesting textures as well. Happy stamping.