NEW CRAFT TECHNIQUE! 🍁 Laminating Leaves Thanksgiving Card 🍁

Hi everyone, it's Lou Collins. Today I want to show you something that's a little bit different with card making. We're not actually going to be using much in the way of paper and cardstock, we're going to be creating a beautiful autumnal card using a laminating machine. Now I've been out foraging, I've got some gorgeous seasonal leaves, branches, seeds, they've all come out of my garden so I love the colours that are around this time of year and I want to capture those. Now just a quick note because lots of you ask when I do anything with laminating pouches is do they not continue to disintegrate within the laminating pouch, do they lose their colour over time and so far the answer is no. I did this about a year ago, you'll probably find that somewhere on my YouTube channel as well where I did another project doing very similar and the colours still remain. There's a very very slight bit of fading but no more than you'd get with cardstock sitting out in daylight anyway so certainly if you're giving this to somebody it will be perfect for the next 6 to 12 months no problem. Now I'm going to just put these to the side for a moment because we're going to start off with adding some background colour and pattern to our laminating pouch. So the ones I choose, I will try to link them down below for you but these ones are actually matte on one side and glossy on the other which gives me the option of using either. Now I think today to keep the colours really nice and vibrant we're going to focus on the glossy being the front of the pouch so I'm going to open this up and I'm just going to crease along the fold there that's going to help us allow to work on this section first of all. So I'm going to use alcohol ink because I know this will dry you don't want to put anything wet through your laminating machine and just a side note my laminating machine is not an expensive one I think it was about £15 from a local supermarket I've had it for years and years it really is it just does the job absolutely fine. So I'm going to use alcohol ink because I need any colour to be dry you don't want to put anything through here that is wet of course electrics and water do not mix so that's why I thought I'll go down the alcohol ink route rather than adding any other colour and if I imagine this is my open card base so this bottom portion will be the front of my card the back portion or the top portion will be the back so I want to focus my design on here now the first thing I'm going to do is just kind of work out if I imagine I might make a bookmark as well so if I imagine my card is going to be around this area I will trim it all down to suit later the first thing I'm going to do is just pop a little bit of yellow in the background there and then use some clear alcohol blending solution just to move those about a little bit now I'm not looking for a lot of colour I just want a little bit of a background shade there so that everything stands out really nicely now because it's alcohol ink that will dry exceptionally quickly so I'll give that a few minutes so that's almost dry now it's got a little bit of alcohol left to burn off as you can probably just see the patch in the middle there but I can carry on and do some more things to this while that's drying I also want to add a sentiment to my card now I'm actually going to add two I'm going to add one stamped inside and then I'm going to add one on the outside as well to build depth and texture so I'm going to make this into sort of like a thanksgiving card so I'm going to have the word thanks written at the side and then I'm going to have when you stop and look around life is pretty amazing so it might be give thanks or something like that all right I'm going to place this in the centre roughly in the centre of my yellow there just bring that down so I think about there now I'm going to stamp this bear in mind that's going to pull on there with stays on ink so this is again an alcohol ink or rather a solvent ink sorry so that will dry on any surface the stamp I'm using is from my textures collection if it's still available I will link it down below so with my stays and I'm just going to press that onto there you can hear that sort of sticking to the surface lovely now I'm going to repeat that a few times to get a nice deep colour there we go I'm happy with that now do you notice the first impression was quite pale and I want to use that I've got some additional just stamps and such here that I'd like to use but I don't want them to be the focal point so I'm just going to scatter these about these are from my mariposa collection again if they are still available I will link them and I'm just going to pop them around not in any particular order and they will just be in the background now while that is now while that's all still in my stamping platform and it's secured down because I have a sticky mat under here I'm actually going to continue to use the stamping platform for now just to position all my embellishments so I've got some dried gypsophilia here now you don't want anything that's too bulky so I wouldn't add a lot of this just a few tiny little seeds I've got some beautiful leaves in dark colours I've got some these red leaves I thought were absolutely stunning now I've got these in and I've had them in for about 24 hours so they have started to dry and curl up a little if you find that they're too dry you can give them a slight mist of water and that will just help to loosen them up again so I'm going to start positioning these coming out from the edge and coming in I really love these purple ones so these are going on first I think that leaf is a little bit I love that leaf I think it's a little bit large for what I want certainly for this project so I'm going to press this one down also don't forget to look at the reverse of your leaves as well you may find that you like the reverse equally as much or even more than the front I'm going to trim any stems off if I can get away with it because stems are usually quite bulky lastly a little bit of gypsophilia or you might know it as baby's breath I'm going to try and spread the flowers out and place them like so when you're happy with everything very gently place your laminating pouch the front down now this will be static so it's best to kind of roll it carefully and make sure that everything still stays where you want it nothing's folding in half nothing's covering your stamped image either just checking everything there now because this is going through and it's very hot the laminating machine I want to like I say doubly ensure that I've got nothing in here peeking over the edge so I'm going to tuck everything into the edges I don't want anything burning once it's going through the machine I like to hold it up I like to hold it level and just be sure as it's going through that again nothing is peeking out of the edges once it grips on to some of them it's a little bit easier to just take a few seconds and move things that are poking out at the bottom press them in but you don't have too long of this now I often like to try to do full laminated cards front and back unfortunately as I went through my laminating machine this portion crinkled up so it ends up like coming out like this a way to get around that is to pop some A4 paper or letter paper just copy paper and so just fold it in half and put it over the first edge of your laminating pouch as you guide it through now I forgot to do that and so I've just trimmed that I'm going to trim this down a little bit more but as you can see look at how vibrant those colors are absolutely beautiful and just for comparison in case you were wondering this is what the matte side looks like now you may love this side you might like that muted tone and so all the colors have a slightly more frosted look if you love that I go with that one or I love how vibrant the glossy ones are so now because I've needed to trim this back down I'm going to need to make myself a card base to pop this into so I'm going to trim this down so that it's just the front of the card and I'm also going to make this bookmark while I'm here so there's the finished card I've simply cut myself a frame from a card base I've adhered that in there with some red liner tape and you can see the difference there between the frosted and the glossy I've doctored myself a title as well from this die set from the textures die set I actually had to use the word bank and then cut the other letters from elsewhere so the F U L is actually made up of simply it's actually a K a U and an L but I think it all works and then as promised there is a bookmark as well to match there could be an additional gift that's just inside the card or you can just keep it for yourself it seemed just a shame to waste that laminating pouch and the additional leaves and such that I collected now that's the difference between the frosted and the glossy you can really see the colors show up beautifully vividly with the gloss side but with the matte you get that vintage look so hopefully I've inspired you to create something today that's a little bit different hopefully you've got a laminating machine at home if not like I say they're really inexpensive to pick up anything else I've used in the way of stamps and a link down below and I'd love it if you could drop me a thumbs up on this video if you liked it take care everybody I'll see you again very soon