Gelli Jam with Kari McKnight Holbrook

If you are reading this post to learn all about gelli printing, you will be sorely disappointed! Patty can tell you much more and show you far better examples! 

Gelli printing is messy and tons of fun. I'd never tried it before, but after my gelli printing class with Kari McKnight Holbrook at SmittenDust, I can see why she loves doing it so much. (This is one of Kari's papers below!)

Gelli printing is essentially making monoprints on a plate made of gelatin (if you do it yourself) or what I suspect is some kind of silicone (if you buy a ready-made gelli plate).

Your supplies include paint -- relatively inexpensive acrylic paint is recommended. Yes, you can use your Golden fluids, but at $1.59 for a bottle of decent craft paint versus $5.99 and more for Golden, this heavy-on-the-paint technique works fine with the less expensive brands.

Your other supplies include a soft paint-spreading brayer and various items you can use for texture and pattern. These include stamps, cheesecloth, rubber bands, string, bubble wrap. You get the idea.

I'm oversimplifying this but basically, you mix your paint on a freezer paper palette (that's a Kari tip that some of you may already know and do. The shiny side of the freezer paper is easy to work with and inexpenive). Plus, when you are done, you can tear it up and use it!

Then bray it directly onto your printing plate.

Lay items on the painted plate for texture and design interest.

Then cover them with your paper and press to transfer the color and design to your paper.

Doing a second "ghost" print after allows you an even different look at what you just did.

When you have a bunch of papers (and you can use about any kind of paper), you can reprint over them with different colors and designs for extremely complicated patterns, like that first photo of Kari's.

There are other techniques, too, and as I said -- I am not the person to share them, for I am just learning.

The good thing about the class is that we are all learning. And we all learn from each other, too -- sharing stamps and stencils along with the supplies generously provided by Kari.

But I thought you might like to see a few of my cards showing how to use the papers. This one is pretty simple, done with a stamp.

I used one with a tree stamp as the background for this Christmas card.

 

And here are two using various papers highlighting my favorite spot! this one used some of the purples from the above tree...

And this one had more peach tones. (The purple on this one below is from a purchased paper.)

 

So, save all your oddly shaped, interestingly patterned flat things and give it a try!

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Thanks to Kari's typically excellent instruction, this one was a great workshop -- and this is a technique I will be using over and over again! (Visit Patty for more inspiration on gelli printing -- just use her search tab to find her posts!)