6 ATCs-IN-ONE by Irit

Hello, my dear crafty friends and welcome to my first ever tutorial for STAMPlorations/ ARTplorations. My name is Irit and I am an Israeli designer and a mixed media artist and I am very happy to be part of this great team.

This tutorial was influenced by two trends: ATCs (2.5" by 3.5" cards which are now more than ever trendy) and pocket letters (same format as ATCs, just 9 of them and not 6, as I made here). Usually, we make ATC one by one, even if we make 3 or 4 of them and in the same theme/format. So why can't we make one single project and then divide it to 6 ATCs? And it can be even better: connect 6 already cut ATCs to one single sheet, and all we need to do later is to peel off the adhesive from the back.

So let's see how we can do six ATCs as one single project.

1. Take 6 pre-cut ATCs or cut them by yourself and then connect them on the back with a good non-permanent adhesive tape.

2: Using the ARTplorations Gridlocked stencil and a texture paste, make a "brick wall" around the connected cardstock piece. I used texture paste that is already colored a bit to a sand color and it's great for tutorial photos; you can also use the white one and just paint, mist, heat emboss, and color it later.

3. Add a bit of brown/natural embossing powder over the wet texture paste and heat emboss it with a heat gun. This phase was mostly to cut in the drying time as we can hardly see the powder at the end.

4. Glue some paper strips/leftovers over the cardstock with good decoupage glue or gel medium. Let it dry or heat it again with your heat gun.

5. As we don't really want to see the paper on our finished project and it was added just for the texture, add some gesso over the cardstock here and there and let it dry again.

6. In this step I used three ARTploration stencils, but didn't take the photos. The blue dots are made with Bubbles stencil that was paint covered and used as a stamp.The green so-called "leaves" are the mess I made using the Botanical Lush stencil with a kind of wrong paint. It's the kind of a paint that is very thick, gel medium mix and as lovely as it is, not a good fit for stencils. But for this mixed media piece nothing is wrong and I just left those green splashes. The last stencil was a blast: the Happy Flowers stencil is exactly the right size to fit this 6-piece ATC project and with good texture paste, it left a fantastic 3D image as you can see. Don't ask me how long it takes to dry because I moved to Plan B in the next step.

7. As tired as I was from waiting for the paste and paint to dry, I moved to embossing powder and just heat embossed the wet images with red and green embossing glitters.

8. Some mists were added over the finished piece (disconnected now), but it was still too bright for an ATC idea.

9. Last, I splashed white mist over the cards, added some blue dots stamped with the back of the pencil, and made some titles with my old and loved Tim Holtz word stickers.

You can make a frame to frame all 6 ATCs. You can also trade them as ATCs. One more thing: if you decide to do something similar, make sure to get a good cup of coffee/tea/soda for the long drying times. Who said mixed media is a fast craft? Certainly not me!