Bernie Berlin ATC Workshop #7 Swap

Part 7 of the ongoing Bernie Berlin ATC Workshop swap through ATC_World seemed a little daunting to me but thankfully Tammy Hixon (the hostess) decided the swap would only contain 2 of the techiques from the book and a smaller number of cards to swap - for which I was extremely grateful.

DIMENSIONAL RESIN

Kyla, Pam and I got together yesterday to make our Dimensional Resin ATCs. Kyla had already made a mould out of sculpy, which we thought would be easier than making the one that Bernie Berlin has in her book ... a tip with using a sculpy mould (or any mould probably), if you spray it first with kitchen oil spray it's much easier to pop the resin ATC out afterwards. We also got a tip from Sheree Rose who had made these ATCs before that the resin is quite fragile and will crack easily if "flex" is not added to the UTEE when melting, so we took her advice and it seems to have worked really well ... 10 beads of flex to 2 teaspoons of UTEE.

Dimensional Resin ATC by Diana, not a great scan, but you can get an idea of it from the side-view picture below. I rusted all my embellishments before I put them into the resin: there's a large heart made out of rusty wire; a heart charm with a key hole; a small key charm; and a flattened bottle cap with a red heart punched out of paper on the front and the back. With these embellishments, I was aiming for 'key to my rusty heart'.

Here's the side-view of my resin ATC on a miniature easel.

ATC by Kyla (again not a great scan). This ATC has: a wing from a butterfly and a dragonfly; a feather; a clock and ants (the ants are a sticker ... they look cool huh). I think the theme Kyla was aiming for is wings of time ... I could be wrong about that though.

ATC by Pam Prosser containing: a seahorse; some small shells and a sprinkling of microbeads.

GLASS-LIKE RESIN

This technique is Glass-like Resin and I only needed to make 2 of these ATCs for the swap, but decided to make 6 so I could trade with Kyla and Pam and have a spare ... it was actually good practice making a few extras as I got better at the technique as I went along. To make a card like this you coat a background with around 2 layers of UTEE ... or 4 layers of normal embossing powder, which is what I did because after making the Dimensional Resin ATC I used up all of my UTEE. While the resin is still warm, you press into it with a large rubber stamp inked with a solid colour to contrast with the background.

I used some left-over scrapbook paper as my background and stamped the two words onto the paper, I then coated the card with the embossing powder and stamped the bird and branch directly into the resin ... you can't actually see the resin in the picture, but it's thick and smooth and looks like glass that has had an image melted into it.

I wonder how many participants will join in on this swap, as it's quite a challenging one and you do need quite a bit of UTEE to make the resin ATC.

"The wisest mind has something yet to learn."
~George Santayana, 1863-1952, Spanish-born American Philosopher~