Mica and alcohol ink backgrounds

On one of my groups they are doing a study of Nancy Curry's book called Texture Effects for Rubber Stamping.Carol Sweeney did a wonderful demonstration of this on white CS on her blog but Nancy originally showed it on black gloss. The theory seems to be that the alcohol inks stabilise and fix the mica powder on the card stock to create a very shimmery background. Well I had to give it a try.
Step one: apply mica powders to Black gloss card stock with your finger ( sorry Kelsey, transdermal applicator). I used interference green and interference gold pearl-ex in this example.
Here is my home made alcohol ink applicator. I applied sticky backed loop tape to a drawer handle and trimmed it to shape. This holds nicely to a piece of felt. The colours are wrong. I used green and yellow inks for this page.


On the left I have used butterscotch and lettuce ranger inks and on the right sunbright yellow and Lime green Pinata inks. I used rubbing alcohol known as Isocol here in Australia as my mixative. You'll see why in a minute. Just smoosh the inks and the Isocol all over the card stock like you do with polished stone technique. If it is drying out just spritz the felt with more Isocol.
Let dry. This happens quickly. Don't spray with acrylic fixative. Ask me how I know.

A cautionary tale. My black gloss card stock did not like the Ranger alcohol blending solution. The black in the CS activated and caused a muddy mess.