 Well, hey there, it's Sandy, and today I'm going to be using another kind of paper for alcohol ink and making a bunch of Christmas cards. This stuff's called mineral paper. I was curious about it, saw it in the art store and picked up a pad. You can screenshot that if you want to read more about it, but it's made of rocks, not trees. So it's not plastic, but it's very much like Yuko in the surface of it. However, I'll get a sheet out here so you can see it. It is thinner than Yuko, but it's not like Yuko has a translucent one that's more like a vellum, and this one is just a thin paper, but I'm going to be using this card that was made by Anne, and it was one that I pulled out of my holiday inspiration grouping of cards that were sent in to inspire me, and I'm going to make some Christmas trees with some alcohol ink paper. So I've put some 99% alcohol into a mini-mister, that's what's in my jar, and I've also put some onto the paper itself, and I'm just going to roll that around to get the whole thing nice and wet and then put some color in it. This paper is very much like Yuko except that it's half the price. It's not very thick, but I didn't find that that bothered me with the cards, and it seems to work about the same. I mean, I haven't played with it for a long time, but for half the price, I thought it was a pretty good deal, and I wanted to be able to share it with you so you can see how cool it actually could be if you like to do a lot of alcohol ink. I have not researched to see if they have any other versions that are thicker, but all the pads that my art store had are the same weight. I'm not using any blowing tools for this, so if you've ever thought you have to have blowing tools, and straws, and compressors, and air guns, and hairdryers, and what not, you don't need to. You can make beautiful alcohol ink things by just getting some paper, some alcohol, and a few inks, and just roll it around. This paper seems to dry a little faster than Yuko does, so that's a good thing, but I still was in a hurry to just get this project done because I really wanted to get this thing. I have so many things on my plate right now, I just wanted to get this idea out there because the cards were going to be so easy and I could knock out a dozen or more cards real quickly, so I was like, I just want to finish. I decided instead of just sitting there letting it dry, which probably would have taken maybe 10 minutes, it was not going to be that very long because there are some areas that were already hinting at the fact that they were drying on their own. In just the moment that I stopped to go to the restroom and come back, the top right corner and the bottom left corner had already dried, and this is all in pretty much real time, so let me see how fast that goes. A lot of times, alcohol ink will just sit there for a couple hours on other papers, and it'll be forever before you can do your next bit of work. But I did decide to speed it up a little bit by using a paper towel to take some color off so that I didn't have big puddles, and then I wanted to add some texture back into it, so on the same paper towel, I just added some ink. There are ink applicators that you can get, but you don't have to have them obviously because you can use paper towel. You could use your fingers for goodness sake, I mean I'm wearing gloves, I could have just dipped my fingers in some alcohol and gone nuts with it, decided not to do that, but if you've wanted to try out alcohol inks, all you need is the paper, the alcohol and the ink, and you could do something beautiful. So I'm going to tap on some more color with this, and since I'm applying it just the straight ink onto the paper, there's no alcohol mixing in with it, so it's not very wet, I'm not getting puddles or anything on this, and so now it was going to be time to start adding some alcohol to get it to look more like alcohol ink, I wanted it to look more blobby, so I sprayed, spritzed with the mini-mister, and if you spritz from way high up, you'll get individual dots, if you spritz from down low, you get a spray, so depending on what kind of look you're wanting, you know, try it from different levels and see what kind of texture it makes, and then I grabbed the insides of the mini-mister and used that as a dropper to put individual drops onto my paper, which gave me little specific dots of color. If you don't want really big dots, then make them apart from each other, and don't put one next to another until it dries, because they all do tend to run together, if you put a whole bunch of them, they want to have a little party. I decided I would move some color around with that paper towel again, go add more dots, and you can work on this and just keep adding to it until the gals come home, and enjoy yourself doing it, it's just a whole lot of fun, but I was already, I was finally satisfied with this, and decided I was going to get busy making the cards. If your paper comes out sticky, then just put some baby powder on it, and rub it with a cotton ball so that you get good coverage, and then wipe it off with a clean cotton ball and a clean Kleenex or something, something soft, and that usually gets the sticky off. So what I'm doing here is cutting strips. You can cut three-inch, four-inch strips, and then this last little skinny one, and then cut them at a diagonal, and it helps if you make sure that you have a good point on each one, but you're basically making trees out of them. You can make as many as you want, you can cut them to different sizes. I love making slimline cards, so I'm going to make some slimline tree cards with these, and I wanted to see how much I could get out of a sheet, and then of course I had another sheet that I had played with before doing this project, so I decided I would cut out the blue ones, too, because I did another color way that I thought would be beautiful, but I'll show you that in a bit, and we get to making these, but what I've done is cut out a panel that's going to be popped on my card. It's going to have some dimension under it, and then sized my trees, just cut off the bottom of them, and saved that little piece, and placed one, two, or three trees onto these panels. Then I cut a panel that's smaller than my front panel. It's, you know, just like by an eighth of an inch, quarter of an inch, depending on how big you want to make that, and then cut a curve, and put that on some dimensionals, so it would be a little bit of a snow bank in front of the base of the trees, and then you don't have to worry about how you whack off the bottom of the trees. You just whack them off and put your snow on top, and then put it onto your card base, and bada boom, bada bing. If you are someone who likes to get your family involved, this would be a really fun project to get the whole family to make your family Christmas cards. Get the kids busy making sheets of alcohol ink, show them how to do it, get everybody around the table assembling trees, trimming them out, maybe mom might have to do the trimming, so we don't lose any fingers, but glue some trees on the cards and add the snow, and here is how the original inspiration compares to what I decided to do, and that's what I like to do with being inspired by something. Take one idea, and I love the idea of three trees, so that's how I translated in this particular case, three trees. You could do any kind of background papers that you've got, so if you've done watercolor techniques that you've got sheets of, if you've got jelly plates, any kind of stuff you've got, use pattern paper for this as well, but it's really fun to use some handmade art for this, especially if you've got some that you didn't know what else to do with. I'm cutting them up into smaller trees now, you could make smaller cards with the extra scraps that are left, but if you've ever cut slimline cards, you'll know there's a chunk of card stock you end up with at the end that has to be cut off so it'll fit in the business envelope, so guess what? Tags! There's no dimension on this one. I just put the snow on the bottom and called it done with a hole in it and a string running through it, but pretty excited that I now have 12 cards and 12 tags to add to my stash for my Christmas stuff, and I'm probably going to go through this process again so I can get another couple dozen done really quickly through this process. So thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for hitting that like button, and if you have not yet subscribed, make sure you do that. Hit the little bell and tell it to send you all videos as notifications so you don't miss a thing. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.