Hello! Today I am sharing cards that were made using alcohol ink ghost stamping technique. This technique is very easy, and allows you to create cool patterns on your alcohol ink cards!
I have followed Jennifer Mcguire’s excellent tutorial for this technique – be sure to head over to her blog and watch it! She is so talented and a huge inspiration.

Alcohol Ink Backgrounds

First, I have made several alcohol ink backgrounds on yupo paper. There are many different ways to do this – if you are not familiar with alcohol inks, this is a great tutorial (again, by Jennifer Mcguire). Here is a photo of the different backgrounds – you can see the cool effects you can achieve with alcohol inks on yupo paper:

We need the ink to be dry before we can start our stamping. Alcohol ink dries quickly, but impatient crafters can use a heat tool to hurry up the process 🙂

Alcohol Ink Ghost Stamping

Once the ink is dry, we can start our stamping. For this technique, we have to use Ranger Archival Inks, because they have a special property that allows them to “lift” the alcohol ink from the paper.
I started by simply stamping the pattern on the paper. For all of my cards I used a background stamp, because it is faster than stamping the entire background with small stamps, but it is of course an option. I used ink colors that matched the colors of my background, but it is possible to do this technique using only Jet Black Archival Ink:

Then, before the ink is dry, I dabbed a few times with a dry cloth the excess ink. After that, I wiped off the rest of the ink with a dry cloth. I think it is best to wipe in a circular motion first, and after most of the ink is gone – switch to straight swipes. From my experiments, I recommend not to skip the dabbing – it takes away most of the ink and prevents smudging. Here is a photo of the background after wiping:

The effect is so cool – my son even told me it is like magic!

Once I had my backgrounds ready, I started to assemble the cards.
My first attempt was to do heat embossing (as Jennifer Mcguire did in some of her cards). It did not work out at all, and the yupo paper got all twisted and warped… I think my Ranger heat tool was not the right tool for this, because it has a fan and the heat is not concentrated.

After this failed attempt, I went on to good old simple stamping. I used cute word stamps by Lawn Fawn, and a clean, straight design for my cards. Here are some close-ups of the finished cards:
I really like the difference between the white and black card bases! Here are two photos of the different designs:

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you liked these cards, and that you will try this technique. As always, if you want to get updates on new posts, please follow my Facebook page or follow the blog!