I don't have Skeletons in the Closet....

But I do have skeleton leaves. In fact I have hundreds of the things, but my quest to use up old crafting materials my have back fired a little! I love leaves on cards, I own many leaf die cutters, often buy paper leaves but sometimes I want something real on my cards, so I dug out my skeleton leaves. Now any one who has been crafting about 5 years probably like me has a good stash of these as they were popular, but they have faded in popularity in recent times (or so I had thought!)
But traditionally skeleton leaves are a little bland, odd colours and not quite what I wanted so I played with them and the only thing I can say is I pimped my skeleton leaves!

 I simply ink them with my versamark and then glaze them with ultra thick embossing powder. It is best to work on your non stick craft mat for this as the leaves are pourous so the embossing powder melts through and they can stick, so if you work on your craft mat you can simply peel them off when they are cool. Now the glazed alone looks lovely and does intensify the colour of them but you can go a little further and really make them something special, all you need to do is brush your choice of mica powder across the glazing (don't brush too hard as you don't want to brush off all the powder) Now the powder will not stay as it is, you will need to heat the surface again, this allows the mica powder to just sink below the surface and be captured in the clear embossing powder. This final touch give the leaves a beautiful lustre and a completly different look to the dated plain skeleton leaves that we all have hiding in the back of our crafting box! With a few of our crafting favourites you can breath new life into any of your old crafting stash, so give it a go.
Happy crafting

Ali