 Hi there, I am Sandy Olnok and today I have something a little bit different for you I don't usually do things with just distressed ink But I have a technique for some distressed ink flowers that I wanted to share Using these Alexandra Rankie dies. They're brand new at least brand new to me I hadn't seen them till Ellen Hudson decided to carry them and I got these five sets because I wanted to see how they work how well they they die cut and And use them for this particular idea I had for using distressing switham But I also wanted to see how they are size-wise in Comparison to the packaging or the picture some of them have larger packaging and smaller dies and some have smaller dies and larger packaging They don't always match Copacetically like this one the little picture on it is the same size as the die So that's a little confusing potentially But at the end you're gonna see and you can go over to my blog as well to see actually a picture of each of the die cuts Next to a card so you can see how these are sized in particular There are plenty more flowers than these over on Ellen's site So you could pick through tons and tons of different flowers apparently Alexandra rinky likes flowers So I'm gonna show you how to do two of these cards and then I'll just show you the finished cards of the other three at The end as well So I'm gonna get my little distress inks out and you can do these in all different kinds of fun colors Got my distress ink applicator tool a little round one and I'm just gonna move this piece of acetate with the dies cut out of it Over and around to put my flowers wherever I want them Now you could do each flower and its stem at the same time But I wanted to get my flower head arrangements done first and figure out which ones I wanted in what colors how I wanted to lay those out You could do a small vignette of flowers. You could do a whole garden full of them You could do a background pattern like this. That would be gorgeous to do that kind of a thing So now I'm gonna switch to a little bit of scattered straw So everything's got to have some yellow and it doesn't it so put some scattered straw flowers When you do your die cutting out of a piece of acetate and this can be any kind of acetate The heavier the better if you want it to last longer if we want to keep it and make more of these flowers later on Just don't die cut them too close to the edge because you don't want your Blending tool to accidentally start putting color out where you don't want it beyond the plastic and When you change colors just take a baby wipe and clean it off and then dry it off for the paper towel gently And then you can reuse this just indefinitely as long as this acetate lasts So I'm gonna get a little bit of peeled paint and then I'm gonna line up each one of the flowers With the the flower head at the top and then go over at the stem itself And that's gonna be a real easy process to just push that color right through that little stem by the boom by the Bing and you'll have a beautiful stem down there at the bottom and As you go through you can change stems you can use a stem from one flower on another flower as you move them around Lots of different ways to do that. There is one die that is just stems and you can see it's got it's the one I'm not using it's the only one that doesn't have ink on it it has a place where this the stem bursts out and then there's a big empty spot in the bottom because with dies in order to get those inner shapes You need to have the inner shapes sit there and you can't do that with this technique So I'm not going to use that particular portion or else. I'm gonna have a big blob of ink in one color But I can also create extra stems by just using the stems from these others and That led to another problem that I discovered that I did but you know, I figured out a solution to that as well Because here I'm gonna I'm gonna try to add the last of my planned stems from the planned flowers and Then start to add some others in between because this was too sparse to me I wanted to have more so I just put a stem where I wanted it and then Went ahead and used it instead of using that little grass piece and then I have I Have another piece of grass along the way that I can add to it And I can stop my inking wherever I want to stop my inking I don't have to go all the way into that flower head and then there's places like that right accidentally put a flower head there Oops, so that's gonna be real easy to go back in later though and add another flower right in that spot So if you mess that up like I did it's perfectly okay to just fix it up by adding a flower But I got my my arrangement done there at the bottom and then here I am fixing the flower I had another one at the top there that sort of had goofed up But I thought I liked the idea of having those little softer ones in the background So I added a few more because it was kind of fun to have some some really soft light ones and You could do a bunch with a whole bunch of different colors and do a whole garden full of them And if you got several of these Alexandra Reiki dies do a garden with a whole bunch of different kinds of flowers in them so there's what the die pieces look like and There's pictures of all this on the blog so you can see that and what I did was create a believe sentiment on it and put a Lawn Fawn die for that little piece popped up and I used these as my Easter cards I did these just before Easter. I didn't have time to post the video before then But I thought I'd make Easter cards out of them So they all have my believe sentiment from an Ellen Hudson set as a Christmas set And I pulled it out for Easter because I didn't have any dies that said happy Easter But believe works for me because then I put on the inside Jesus is alive So there you go This one is another beautiful die It's a tulip die and it has some intricate parts on the inside of that tulip head And so I'm trying to add some some colors in here I've got some I think this was the picked raspberry with a little bit of scattered straw trying to make sort of a Salmon color overall and let the colors kind of blend together and add my stem to it and Then I wanted to add the detail from the die itself So I took the die that I cut out of some paper so that you could see it You could also do this with the clear plastic the acetate But it was a little easier for you to see what I'm doing and then hold it in place and tap more ink onto the inside and I'm going to add a little bit more color to it as well and a little bit If I can hold it in place there add a little bit of purple at the bottom so that I get more of that gradation of color and then lift it up and See how beautiful it is. Look at that. Look at that gorgeous detail Well, you'll see it in a minute. I've covered it up And then I'm going to do another one of the flowers and I'm just going to do it in different colors down here below it and I'm doing it in lighter colors so I can make it look like it's tucked behind and You know using some of that scattered straw again add some more of the picked raspberry at the bottom Like nice light colors on this one. The other one was darker richer colors Just add a little bit more under there add that flower back in now Notice you can also do them left right upside down so you can flip the dies you can flip the templates and Do them different directions too and get a different look from your your same dies add my stem here and Lift that up and look how pretty those tulips are. I think gorgeous You can see one is flipped left right from the other so they're slightly different There's one other small die in this one, which is a little one And I'm gonna make just a little yellow bud out of that one a little tiny bit of pink on it because that's gonna Help it to have a little bit of definition and then make my stems cross Which I thought was a little more elegant. I'm just having a straight stem So here is the dies that I just used on that one and the finished card I had the believe on that one popped up the panel and I used some of the pinkish and purplish colors on the left and Yellowish colors on the right to color my card base and add a little bit more to that This one was an interesting diets called tendril and I used that one to create just a little vine garden along the side how gorgeous is that and Use the green colors the two green shades to do a gradated little panel on the card base And I just thought that was really pretty you could also use this The cutout piece as a mask and create some white lines and and use them in that kind of a way Now this one is called poppies and it is really beautiful. I made this bouquet of the poppies I used the colors from it to make the panel on the left hand side on the card base But to make the vase what I figured out to do because I wanted a vase and there's no vase die here I cut a piece of the acetate I just made a curve and make any old wonky curve and then you can hold it up to where you want your vase to be and Then do your inking from there use something like washi tape across the top But there I've created the two sides of the vase by just flipping that piece of acetate and then save that and use it with other cards Then we have these little snow drops and there's gonna be stills by the way of each one of these So you'll be able to see them If you want to pin them and know what size everything is and again on this one I used the Lawn Fawn stitched hill sides die to create a little little ground for it and just made some really pretty light little snow drop flowers And there's all of the cards together aren't they a beautiful set that I sent out for Easter this year You could put all kinds of sentiments with them They'd be great for Mother's Day all kinds of beautiful stuff that you can make with these dies Check them all out. There's tons of Alexander rinky I'll put a link to the whole category as well because you're gonna want to see it all it's gorgeous stuff All right. I'll see you guys later. Take care. Bye