Crafters will know...

...watching demos can be dangerous for your health wealth.

Saturday before last, I only went over to Barleylands to go to the Farmers Market - honest!

It was a lovely day and after wandering around the stalls I took myself into the café for a spot of lunch. On my way out, I was passing Sugar & Spice and they had a chalk-board outside stating "Demo - today" - so I wandered in...as you do...

After spending a couple of very enjoyable hours watching Marion & Nina and having a bit of a play myself. I took a pack of these home with me...

 ...there wasn't a huge amount of choice as other customers had nabbed the other sets, but I rather liked these colours. As I was saying goodbye, Marion threw down the challenge to show what I did with them when I popped in this week.

So, armed with one of these...

...an old hardback book picked up for a few pence.
A tub of this...

...white gesso. A selection of stencils/masks, stamps, Spritzing ink and wet wipes and I was ready to go.

The first thing was to prepare the book by applying gesso to several pages and then letting it dry.

Then it was playtime!

I used two shades from the pack of Gelatos - Snow Cone & Raspberry - and just scribbled randomly over the page. Now you can blend the colours by just using a wet finger but you all know that I don't like to get my hands mucky so I used a wet wipe. This actually gave a lovely smooth blended coverage of the pages. I then selected a stencil of Roses & flourishes and used the reverse stencilling technique with the wet wipe removing some of the colour through the stencil. I have had a couple of clear stamps from Joy for a while - both are ladies heads - and using Tuxedo black Memento I stamped each onto the pages. I tried to use the Memento pad to stencil some leaves onto the pages but this didn't work too well so I grabbed some Artiste spritzing ink in Black Night and sprayed it onto the scrunched-up wet wipe before dabbing around the edges of the pages.

This is the finished result...

...which I was rather pleased with.
Looking at the pack of Gelatos above you might think that these next pages were coloured with the other two shades...

 ...nah! You would be wrong.
When I popped into Sugar & Spice to show Marion what I had done with my Gelatos...

...I noticed they had got some new stock and a couple of packs just sort of leapt into my basket **whistles & rolls eyes innocently**

So I have a ready coloured set of pages - I just need to decide what I'm going to do with them. I also have some black gesso and would love to see how the colours work with that as the base...I need to prepare some pages.

I had seen folk talking about Gelatos on various crafting forums but it wasn't something that I thought I would use as I associated them with art journaling - not my thing. However, I love the idea of using this old book to just 'play' and try out techniques and I can see me using the Gelatos to create coloured backgrounds for my cards or even on canvases.

I really hadn't planned on buying these (famous last words) - good job there is plenty of bread in the freezer and a load of tins of Baked beans in the cupboard.................................................................