Photo Inspiration at Ikesworld

It's Team B's time to share at Ikesworld Challenges and this time Ike has given us a photo to use as inspiration.

Aren't the colours gorgeous?  I enjoy the colours of autumn so much.  This year autumn has arrived late here and the trees have only just changed colour (in fact, there's one or two stubbornly remaining green at the mo).  There's definitely less daylight about, as well.  So, for my DT project this time, I decided to decorate a candle with Ike's Autumn Nymph digi, which I coloured in digitally , because the technique uses tissue paper which would be tricky to colour in with markers in this (small) scale.

If you haven't come across this technique before, it is incredibly quick and simple to do.  Print, draw or stamp your chosen image onto tissue paper.  (You can print onto tissue paper - the kind that you wrap precious items in, not the Kleenex kind- by taping the edge that goes into the printer first to a piece of ordinary paper.)  Tear around your image (the rough edges make the tissue "disappear" into the wax.  Then place your image onto your candle and wrap it in a piece of baking paper or greaseproof paper or wax paper - something that you can see through, will take being heated, and is non-stick.  It needs to be long enough to go all around the candle with a bit left over for you to grip.

Now, take your heat gun in one hand and pick up the candle by gripping the extra baking paper so that you can see the image through it and heat the candle.  The image will look faint and pale at first but as the wax melts it sinks into it, and it suddenly appears brighter.  Once that happens, move on until the whole image is clear.  Unwrap the candle and just as easy as that, you have a fancy candle.  Most pillar candles have a wick that is, strictly speaking, too thin, so that the outer shell of the candle doesn't get consumed. If this applies to the candle you've used, it can be burned - but do be careful as if the flame gets to the tissue, it'll flare up and you'll have an incident on your hands.

So that's my offering, and there's lots of inspiration over at Ikesworld Challenge blog.  How about joining in the fun?  We'd love to see what you come up with, and if you use one of Ike's digi's, you might win a prize!