 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock, and today I'm going to be doing my first jelly plate printing project. Ah! I know, crazy, right? I have had this jelly plate for at least probably 10 years, I don't know. I've used it apparently, because it's dirty, but the jelly plate seems to be okay. It was wrapped in its wrapping and stuff, so it seems to be fine. So I'm going to go ahead and try it and see how it works. I did have to get a new brayer, and I got this one that is a hard rubber brayer. I don't know if there's a difference between brayers, but I will find out in coming months because I'm going to be experimenting with some fun stuff in the future. I did decide to use this Hanamula bamboo paper. It's terrible for every other thing that I've tried it for. I have not enjoyed watercolor on it. I don't really like pen and ink on it all that much, so let's see if printing on it is going to get rid of the package, because I just want to use it up. I started by trying to make some cards that were inspired by one of my holiday inspiration cards. I forgot to show it in this section of the video. You'll see it in just a moment, but the card has a background that was done with a jelly plate, which is what inspired me to get this out. She had some colors in it that I really loved, and I wanted to see if I could mimic that kind of a look. It didn't succeed, I'll tell you, in this first try, so I just decided I would mix the colors myself using white with the blue and the green that I had because I don't have very many colors. I just don't own many and figured I'd just put some color on here and see what happens. Why not? I have no idea how much paint to put on. Am I doing too much? Am I doing not enough? I have no clue in the world, so yeah, I'm just going to try it and see. I decided not to go look up a bunch of YouTube videos on how to do it because that only teaches me how it's already been done. It doesn't teach me anything new and different, so I love playing with mediums before I know what I'm doing because sometimes I'll come up with something completely new without any preconceived notions. So I put my color down and pressed my paper on it. Again, I don't know how hard you're supposed to press. No idea, but there you go. My first background, woohoo! However, it didn't even come close to matching the color I was trying for, but I had extra color left on my brayer, so I decided to try it. The print that was on there first on that paper was trying to get off any excess from the jelly plate, but that didn't do much. So brayered on some more color, and then I wanted to really get rid of all the color on the brayer, so I just kept going over it to try to remove some of that because I wanted to clean all this up so I could start again with the right color and mix up the right color to match what I was trying for. And I figured out how to clean a jelly plate. I don't know if this is how you're supposed to. Maybe you're supposed to take it under the sink, but I used a baby wipe and then put the plastic on the front and back of it so that if it sat there for a while, I don't know if it's going to dry out. Maybe you all can tell me in the comments some of the dumb things I'm doing because I'm sure I'm doing some dumb things. So I cleaned everything up, cleaned the brayer and everything, and then started mixing paints. We'll go a little faster this time. And in order to mix that blue, I was going to need something different because it's a much cooler blue. It has some red in it. So I started mixing colors until I got the right red. Now most people would say, oh, that's just a blue, but look at how much pink I have to put into that to make it match what's on the card. And you know, playing around with it, trying to figure out how light to make it as well, didn't know how light or how dark it was going to need to be to match what was on the card. But the green I mixed in kind of the same way. I added a little bit of the pink to it just to dull it down a little bit so it wouldn't be quite as bright. Here's a mistake I made. I put extra white on the surface of the jelly plate, just directly squeezed it out on there. And I thought I was being really smart to add some extra lightness to it. But instead what I added was blobby dis because the layer that's on the bottom, like touching the jelly plate, is what's going to show up on your paper. The layer that I see that might make my eyes happy is going to be on the bottom side. It's going to be touching the paper. And I wasn't really thinking about that. I wasn't thinking in reverse. So yeah, that was not maybe necessarily the smartest thing I've ever done because look at my weird blobbies that I now have. So then it was going to be a matter of figuring out how to fix that. And I decided to try just using the brayer itself with the leftover color. That didn't seem to do a whole lot because I didn't have much left on the brayer. So I was trying to really squish it in there and soften some of those hard blobs. But then I decided I was going to try to mix a darker color because it still wasn't dark enough from the jelly printing. So I mixed a darker version of that same blue and pink color together. And I didn't overbrayer at this time because I wanted to leave some of the lighter color showing through and then some of that darker. Yes, I am avoiding the blob. I don't like paint on my fingers. I'm weird that way. But the color worked out much better. I was much happier with my background. Now it came time to clean off this brayer because I wanted to put it away really tidy. It's a brand new brayer. And I had paint that even though it hadn't sat there for very long was stuck. So I did go to YouTube to find how the heck to do this. I didn't want to leave it on there overnight or for a week or whenever till I get to my next jelly printing. And somebody said on YouTube that you can use alcohol. So I put a little alcohol onto a paper towel and then wiped it off and then rinse the whole thing really well afterward so there would be no alcohol left. I don't know if that's going to do anything to the rubber. But it didn't work very well to clean it. All right, next to the rest of the card making since I have my great backgrounds, they trimmed them down to fit in my Misti and then used distress oxide inks to stamp the follow la la la background and did that on both of them in different ways, different colors, things to try to figure out how I was going to make this work. I was using my baby wipe to clean off the stamp and had a thought while I was doing that because I realized that the distress oxide ink is water soluble. So I could soften the look of it and I dabbed on it to sort of make it fade into the background a little bit. Now I know there's jelly printing ways you can do that. I have no idea what they are. So I'm just doing it with the stamping and this kind of a baby wipe technique. I pulled out the other one as well to move some of that color around and soften that one because I didn't like quite how strong the follow la was on both of these and that made me much happier. Stamping the tree in both of those blues, just tapping on the color and then retapping color to add more to it, gave the tree a distressed look and created just a really beautiful element to put on the front of that card. Now the tree, you could also get the dye and it's a beautiful, really simple tree, very useful for a lot of different things. And what I did here was die cut the tree. I was going to use it on a different card out of the background. And then I added a couple other trees. I moved one up to make it taller and I moved another down and like cut off a third of it to make a shorter tree. And then for the snow, I used a white gel pen, my Uniball Signo gel pen to make the snow in the sky and then just a flat brush with some of the acrylic white paint. Dabbed on to make some distressed looking snow in the ground. And that kind of matched the whole jelly plate look and worked pretty well. This one, I embossed a sentiment on it and my embossing went crazy. I just had all kinds of trouble with it. So I added a ton of snow to hide the fact that I had embossing powder all over the place. And then I added the snow to the ground underneath of the trees. And those trees, of course, are die cut from scraps of one of the other pieces. So it's good to be able to use those pieces and intermix them. And this one I had some design issues with because the way that I stamped that tree and then put the sentiment where I did, I wanted the sentiment to relate to the tree. But then I had this big space left over on the left side. And I needed to find a way to balance the card better because this was just not working for me. I'm really big on my design elements on my cards. And the snow helped. I do like things that are off center, so I like the off center focus. But I needed some other, I don't know, something else on the left hand side to make this work better. What I opted to do was to glue down a piece that would just go as a band around that front panel. So I lifted it up, glued that down and tied a knot. Just a nice flat knot with some same wide ribbon around it. And I need my scissors sharpened really badly. The scissors were just giving me fits. So I think that's going to be my next to-do list. Getting those puppies nice and sharp. And I added a snowflake to it, which all of that white still led me, led my eye to see the rest of the card. So the color on that kept it lighter and less focused. So that the focus goes to the tree and the sentiment. So there's my first jelly print experiments. I know I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm having fun doing it, whatever it is. So I'm okay with that. And I will see you guys later. Take care, have an awesome, awesome day. Go make something beautiful. See ya.