Forgeries on the Fourth - the May edition!

Great to see you here today and are you excited to see that I forged some items? It's not often that I'm creative or imaginative enough to actually come up with ways of forging the embellishments or papers in my Counterfeit Kit Challenge kits - after all, we have the Queen of Forgery, Leslie, to show us all how it's done. 

But with the recent changes going on over there at CKC (see the blog post here) and me being more involved than ever, I thought it was time for me to pick up my output and get my thinking cap on more often.

Two items in the current inspiration kit (plus add ons) caught my eye - the two-toned veneer pieces and the stripes alphabet.

So let's see how I got on. It's definitely not all perfect round here...

First up, I had a go at the veneer items. I fished out a handful of hearts because I can see me using those most often.

I then added some washi tape along the centre line to create a masked off area and leave the other half to be coloured. 

I took out a handful of paints in colours I thought I could work with - some came out better than others - pink, lemon, blue and green with lashings of white to get the shade I wanted.

And then all I did was paint the exposed half in the different colours.

As you can see with the results below, some of them have a super clear, clean line of colour while a few have a little bleeding of colour into the other half. My feeling is that these paints were a little thinner and therefore a bit more watery allowing the colour to seep under the washi line. If you keep the paints relatively thick, I think the effect is super.

I'm particularly in love with the pinks and yellows.

Next up was a frustrating attempt at the black&white striped alpha.

I found a plain white canvas Thicker pack which is designed for colouring or misting. Of course, a diagonal or striped stamp would have been much better and easier, but I don't have one and in the spirit of counterfeiting without adding extra stash or cost, I continued to work through all these examples with just a ruler and Sharpie.

The canvas alpha proved too rough a surface for the pen to really make a good, clean line and at that point, I still hadn't quite got the knack of the distance etc I needed to leave with the ruler lines.

Next up was a basic font, plain chipboard pack of Thickers and this one worked much better, even if I wasn't quite so neat in the first place. With practice, I was able to make a few letters quite tidy and I really like the result.

The ruler needs to be used so that the edge is slightly lifted off the letters or you get a nasty drag mark such as below and I used some of the letters I'm unlikely to use for practice to get a feel for it.

I will not be turning the whole set stripey but if I want to make a striped title, then I will lift off the letters onto some greaseproof paper and then slowly and carefully, make the stripes. This is not an exercise to be rushed (which is my usual way of working) and I really like the effect that it produces.

So there you have it. Trial and error but still a lot of fun. And you know how long it took me to try these two ideas out? Less than 30 minutes in total! I always imagine it's going to take much longer than it really does. I often think that coming up with the idea is the time consuming bit.

Anyway, check out the Counterfeit blog today to see what other Master Forgers have come up with - there are quite a few this month! And I happen to know that at least three of us had a go at the veneers so I'm interested to see if they were more successful than me.