The Big Bang?

Depending on whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist, you will either believe the Earth and the Universe were created by a big bang or you will believe it was created by some higher being.  I am of the former school of thought!  I went to school and studied sciences and have seen and heard far too much since to believe that life as we know it was created by anything other than a chain of scientific phenomenon. So when the challenge at Dream Valley Challenges was 'New Beginnings' I decided to try and think outside the box and steered away from birth, marriage and home moves and come up with something a little different.

I started this project off by stamping some circles and swirls using my clear acrylic stamping block and my Inkadinkadoo stamps using clear embossing ink and then sprinkled silver pearl powder over dusted off and embossed.  I don't think it matters what colour you use as long as it is a light one (which I will explain in a bit). I created the background using Tim Holtz' Adirondack Color Wash sprays in stream, raisin and pesto.  I wet the paper first and gave a quick blast with the 3 colours to create the background.  Just love the way all the colours merged and swirl about and create a quite random design on the paper but they are so damn strong!  I ended up with a left hand looking like I had early stages of gangrene and pretty blue cuticles when I first tried them out.  The lesson of the story here is to use gloves but I can never find a pair when I need them and like to get down and dirty with dyes so invariably I end up with multi-coloured hands (it washes off eventually lol). Anyway, moving on.  Once the inks had been dabbed off a bit (Usually get very strongly coloured pools of ink, hence the multi-coloured hands problem) I heated up my iron to it's highest setting.  I use a normal household iron for this, but it is VITAL not to have any water in it at all so it doesn't leak or randomly give you a head of steam which does not work well with inks and paper!  Next step, using a sheet of newspaper with a sheet of greaseproof paper over the top, simply there to make the iron glide easier and to stop newspaper inks marking the iron plate (an important item if you want to use the iron for it's original purpose afterwards), I ironed over the image.  This causes the embossing powders to melt again which then get absorbed in their liquid form by the newspaper.  Clever huh?  What you are then left with is a nicely dyed piece of paper with a bleach effect as the stamped image is now white.

Using the same stamps again, I inked up with black and then, using the central stamp to line up, I turned the block clockwise and stamped, then repeated again.  The idea I was going for was to give the impression of the beginning of the world with explosions and lots of molecules flying about.  I 'think' it worked :-/  I then used some individual letter stamps to create the text 'In The Beginning...' around the forming planet, stamped in black then highlighted with white.