Stamping with bleach can give your cards or projects new life! Outlined below are several techniques and tips to help you get started. Please note that bleach starts to deactivate after about 20 minutes when left out in the open. Also make sure to clean your stamps after using bleach as it will eat away at the rubber!
Types of Bleach
- Regular Bleach
- Bleach Pen
- Gel Bleach
- Dishwasher Gel Detergent
Making a Bleach Stamp Pad
Place several thicknesses of paper towel on a plate to make the stamp pad. Saturate the paper towels with bleach. Using different amounts of bleach will give different results. Lynn B. found that using a smoother paper towel gives a better stamped image. Some of the more expensive paper towels have ridges and bumps to absorb liquid, but don't give the best stamped image.
- Use a 3x5 piece of felt on a plate and saturate with bleach. Felt doesn't fall apart from the bleach eating it like other mediums do. An ice cream bucket lid works great as a holder for your stamp pad.
- Glue a piece of felt onto a margarine tub lid or any other plastic lid and pour bleach onto it. Then use it as a "stamp pad".
- Try having three different bleach stamp pads - one full strength bleach, and the other two with different dilutions of the bleach. This will give a collage feeling with the three different strengths.
Other than a Stamp Pad
- Put bleach in a spray bottle and spray the cardstock for an all over speckled look. You don't want to leave bleach in the spray bottle though because it will "eat" the spray nozzle.
- Fill an Aquabrush with bleach and use it to bleach areas you want lighter (see Coloring with Bleach).
- Clean out a nail polish bottle and then fill with bleach. The brush is already attached to the cap and the little bottle isn't easy to knock over and spill.
Coloring With Bleach
The best way to color with bleach is to first emboss your image. Then using an Aquabrush or Q-tips, use bleach to color in the whole image or parts of the image. Then color in the lightened areas using markers, water colors, Pearl-Ex or whatever your favorite coloring technique is. Aimee L. uses clear embossing powder to give a really different look.
Other Bleach Techniques
- You can use your wheel with bleach also. Just make a stamp pad and wheel your wheel in the bleach stamp pad. Remember, you have to "re-ink" after one turn of the wheel.
- Stamp with bleach and then right over it stamp with versamark and a color of your choice. It will make it look three dimensional.
- Use a Spectrum ink pad and brayer the color on glossy. Then put full strength bleach in a mister bottle and gently spritz the card once. After everything is dry, use black ink and stamp images. Makes a great easy card!
- Another Spectrum Pad use: Take black cardstock and bleach various images on the cardstock. Once it is bleached out and dry, brayer the entire card with Spectrum Pad. The colors show on the bleached out part, but not on the black cardstock.
- Stamp your image with bleach and without picking up the stamp, move it in one direction. Then stamp the same image with Classic Ink over the bleach image and you get a halo effect.
- Stamp a background in Versamark on colored cardstock and then stamp the image with bleach over the versamark - the versamark image "embosses" (pops up) through the bleach.
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