I Brake For.....Bister!

Hello my stamping friends!  I hope you are all doing well.  Today's card is using a product called  Bister.  It's my first time using it and I can see all sorts of possibilities.  You can find the Bister products at IBFS here. First, my card.

What is Bister?  Essentially water soluble wood stain, similar to watercolor powders, but these are different than what you may have seen elsewhere.  IBFS's Bister comes from the Netherlands.  It's a tiny bit more granular than other watercolor powders.  I believe it is made from crushed walnuts.  All colors have a wonderful earthy undertone to them.   They are very easy to work with - just sprinkle some on some watercolor paper and spritz on water.  Or you can put water on your paper first then sprinkle on the Bister.

In my experimenting I sprinkled some Blue and Green Bister on the paper and added water. ( I thought I had taken photos of he background before I assembled my card, but I did not - the background on the card shows a little bit of what it looks like.)

Next I took some Flower die cuts (from a Silhouette file) and did the same - here is my result.

And the ribbon?  I took some seam binding and wiped up the excess Bister and water from my craft sheet and ended up with some pretty dyed ribbon to coordinate!

I still had some errant Bister on my craft sheet so I added more water and using another piece of paper just wiped up the diluted color onto that paper.  This piece ended up being my base tag.

I wanted to try another color so I sprinkled some Mahogany Bister  onto paper....Oh My!!!!  The color was so beautiful!  I ended up cutting some leaf shapes with this color - here they are.  This color will look gorgeous for fall cards.  I have a bunch of leaf stamps and dies that will see  a lot of this Mahogany color! I added two of these leaves to my card.

So..no stamps on this card - I'll add a sentiment later when I decide who to send the card to, and for what occasion.

I hope you will give Bister powders a try - they are fun and easy to work with.  I made a feminine card here but because of their earthy colors I can see these being used for masculine cards, vintage, mixed media and so many other areas.

Hop on over to the IBFS store for all the Bister colors and many wonderful stamps.

Thanks so much for stopping by today!