Bleached out

My third post for the Chocolate Baroque colour challenge involves lots of shrink plastic and inky backgrounds. Besides CB (orange, purple, pink, maroon), I'm posting for the May challenge at Our Creative Corner (April showers bring May flowers) and the Paperilla card challenge (Flowers, flowers!)

I had an idea of a card with an inky background and shrink plastic flowers growing like hollyhocks... so I made a large amount of flowers in different sizes using the Steampunk flower stamps from CB. With great hopes I made a background using bister, which is a brusho-like product in earth-tones. The red bister turned brown when it dried, parts of the Archival ink stamping dissolved in the bleach when I tried to make the image lighter... I tried spraying with pink, but the image practically returned to what it was before the bleach. I gave up on it, and since there was nothing to lose, I decided to bleach the whole thing just to see what I'd get -the only option being to glue something on top. This is what it became, and I liked it.

Had to try again, here's the next one:

I still had shrink plastic flowers to go, so I made a third background in ATC size, this time I even took photos along the way:

Red bister on Stampinback cardstock. Doesn't seep in, has to be dried with heatgun.
Practically dries into an ugly brown (on porous surfaces it is dark red like fresh blood!)

Stamping with Archival Jet black

Used bleach on the stamping

Sprayed with Dylusions Bubblegum Pink

Bleached the whole card. Probably less bister than on the previous ones
(or it didnät have time to seep in), because it practically all disapeared.

Some Dried Marigold Distress ink on the edges and doodly sewing.

What surprises me most is the fact that the pink Dylusions spray doesn't bleach out. It must have something to do with the cardstock, because elsewhere I have bleached it. My theory is, that the bister makes a thin layer on top of the coated cardstock, acting (if it is thick enough) as a resist for both the stamping and the pink ink. The bleach probably both bleaches and dissolves the bister, and the dissolving effect maybe erases the stamping. In some places the stamping has obviously worked as a resist for the pink too. It seems the pink spray attaches to the coating of the cardstock better than the bister that would just run of if it wasn't dried with a heat gun. Hmm.