A Book Review & Household Hint

I rarely buy crafting books. I did when I first started stamping and scrapbooking, but found the ones I bought were ones I never seemed to refer back to. But I was very intrigued with this book by Julia Andrus called Paper Transformed that I spied during my last trip to the book store. After a thorough look-through I felt it would be a good investment and purchased it. I was right. This book is filled with loads of different techniques (some I've tried, but a lot I haven't.) to transform your paper. It's a great basic how-to book when it comes to using chalks, watercolors, alcohol inks, perfect pearls. beeswax, batik, bleaching, and on and on.
I've already created a few alcohol ink backgrounds I learned from this book, one of which is included at the end of this post and one I used yesterday for my Wednesday Stamper piece.

To create the background for this ATC and the one shown in yesterday's post the book suggests applying drops of alcohol inks randomly onto glossy cardstock. Then apply your alcohol blending solution and watch these cool circles develop.

Now for the household hint: Picture yourself playing with your alcohol inks and all of a sudden you drop the bottle of plum alcohol ink on your carpet? What to do?

Well, when it happened to me yesterday I stared in horror at this huge plum streak across my beige carpet. I racked my brain trying to think what would remove this stain. And then an idea came to me -- well, if you use the alcohol blending solution to lighten the alcohol inks, why not try it on the carpet! I proceeded to squeeze a very generous amount of the blending solution to the carpeting and then blotted it up. Voila! Stain removed!