I like the idea of having the inside and the outside patterned, but didn't want it to take very long nor be very thick; then I remembered that lizard waxed paper I'd done on a Batik Intro course a while ago. So I followed the instructions for the basic TriFold by today's DT Tammy, and just backed the single sheet of batik lizards with some white cartridge paper (otherwise there's nowhere to write a message.
It looked a bit unfinished, so I had a rootle in the weekend's Hobbycraft haul for the stick-on eyes: I did wonder at the time what the difference was between Easy Eyes and Stick-on Eyes (the easy being 4x the price of the others) and now I've found out - you need your own glue for the Stick-on Eyes, and shorter finger nails than I've got.....
The batik paper was quite easy to fold, and I got those sharp creases using an iron (fortunately I used my old 'crafting' iron and did it between sheets of paper, as quite a lot of wax came out and my beloved cleaning lady would have been deeply unimpressed if I'd messed up her new laundry iron). Best of all, the light shines through the paper even with the cartridge backing.
For the interested: batik is a form of stamping using hot wax. The stamp is a commercial one made of a ribbon of metal bent into the appropriate shape, but you can mess around with your own designs, you just need a handle to keep the hot wax away from sensitive fingers...To get the layered effect on this paper, I did an initial set of lizard stamps in hot wax onto white paper, then painted it with pale blue ink wash, then I did another set of lizard stamps in hot wax onto the blue surface, then painted it with a mid blue wash, repeated another set of lizards, painted it with a magenta wash, repeated another set of lizards, and did a final paint in dark blue.
If you wait for the ink to dry between the steps the paper stays intact, if you don't it gets quite distressed (torn) - I must have waited with this one as it's pretty pristine, probably because everyone in the class was taking turns with the lizard stamp...
Then you iron it between sheets of newspaper (with white paper next to the image sheet to protect if from newsprint transfer), using clean sheets once the first lot is full of wax, ad infinitum, until you end up with a piece of paper that's slightly more stiff than it started off.
True professionals wipe it down with white spirit etc to get the final wax out to give more pliability, but I can't be bothered and like the extra structure you get with the wax left in a bit. You just have to remember that wax will still come out if you iron it again later (like I did to make it flat as it had been stored rolled up, and to get the scoring to hold). To keep everything clean I layered the image in white copy paper, then newspaper, then baking parchment on both sides.
PS I think there's something wrong with my picture settings, I can't doubleclick on some pics to get a bigger image. Anyone know how to fix this in Blogspot?
