another little how-to

on friday evening, after the philly etsy team's monthly meeting, i decided it was time to make a new set of thank you cards to send out with girlscantell shop purchases. i was trying to think of something a little different and fun to do for them, something that would use materials i had on hand, and preferably re-use some bits of things i might have otherwise discarded.

i settled on a technique i've not employed since college (ahhh, studio), but that i always thought yielded pretty nice results - acetone transfers.

materials needed:

photocopied pages to transfer from
acetone (can be found at art or hardware stores)
surface to transfer to (posterboard, paper, wood, plexi all work nicely - i used some old pantone sheets)
paper towels
clean work surface (preferably not a fine finished surface)

first, you want to put a little acetone onto a papertowel.

place the photocopied sheet to be transferred face down on the surface to be transferred to

hold the photocopy firmly in place and rub the acetoney paper towel over the photocopy to transfer the copy-ink onto your surface.

once you've rubbed acetone over the whole paper to be transfered, lift the paper off your surface.

yay! the image from the photocopied paper has been transferred to your final surface!

you may be thinking... why do this? well, i know it seems a little silly to transfer photocopied text and images from one paper onto another, but there are a couple things i like about this process.

the transferred image usually rubs on in a light, ephemeral sort of way, creating a nicer effect than plain old copied pages. also, you can repeat this process multiple times, easily creating a layered image on your original surface. even better, is that this is a lovely way to dress up surfaces you can't print directly onto, like wood or plexi - for model making, this process was really useful.

to avoid transferring the information from a photocopy backwards onto your surface (for example, if you wanted to transfer a map and have it be useful), simply photocopy your image backwards onto the paper you're transferring from.

repeat this process as many times as needed to create the desired effect on your surface.

then i cut the large sheets of pantone into strips.

and into small square-y shapes...

to fold into little notecards...

for thank you's!

enjoy! (and to get one of these little cards of your own, order something from the shop!)