Take A Leap!

I've been puttering with some products lately and I wanted to tell you a little bit about them. As usual, I have no affiliation with these companies and I won't make a dime or become famous if you go out and buy stock in them based on this blog post. dangit

Over the last eight months, I've found a couple of ways to get Stacked Journaling onto various substrates including fabric, paper and framed artist canvases. By a couple, of course, I mean 385621093756589290174 Billion. And every time I think I've found and explored the very last method, another method presents itself.

This weekend, while piddling with some of my old hand-dyed fabrics, I pulled out this handy gadget, meant to help brighten your laundry.

Using the narrow end of it, I did some Stacked Journaling with it on this fat quarter.

Not bad. The opening was designed, of course, to deliver thickened bleach to household stains, not for actual writing, so the product comes out accordingly in thick, ropey lines that tend to soak into the fabric and then spread. Handy to know when I want to create large text.

But for the fine, thin lines I usually crave for SJ, I needed a better solution. I turned to a Jacquard product I often use on squeezie paint bottles:

These metal tips come in three diameters, .5mm, .7mm, and .9mm, and are perfect for getting clean, thin lines. (You can usually find them either online or in an art store.) Who knew they'd also fit on the end of a bleach pen?

Ahhhhh, much better! For this bit of text (and I know you can't tell the scale, but the whole text block itself only measures about eight inches long by five inches tall) I created some monoprinted Stacked Jouranling by writing with the bleach pen on parchment paper, turning the paper over onto a piece of hand-dyed fabric, and pressing gently.

I'm feeling like the possibilities are endless for this combination of inexpensive tools. The bleach gel is the perfect consistency for squeezing through even the tiniest metal tip and once the bleach is used up and the pen is empty, I can wash and neutralize the pen so it can be repurposed. It's comfortable to hold, and for writing it's easy on the hands- and believe me, that's becoming a huge issue with me: I don't want to reach the age of 50 with Carpal Tunnel in both hands from years of Stacked Journaling! I can reuse the pen over and over by filling it with paints, adhesives, thickened dyes, or even home-made thickened bleach.

Necessity really is the mother of invention.

Create with a sense of curiosity!

- Judi