Permanent Gelatine plate made with Gelatin leaves

By special request a quick blogpost with the recipe to make a permanent gelatin plate with gelatin leaves, in stead of powdered gelatin.

I got the original recipe from Lindsay, The Frugal Crafter, but since the powdered gelatine isn't easy to come by here in the netherlands, I adjusted her recipe to use the materials I could find here easy. I also found another great blogpost by Shaz in Oz, she doesn't use alcohol, but substitutes it with sugar. When I made my plate I couldn't find her post anymore, so I used Lindsay's recipe as a starting point. I'm glad I have since found it again.

Here is Linsay's recipe:

• 6 Tablespoons geletin (7 packets)
• 1 1/2 Cups water 
• 1 Cup Alcohol (70% isoprophal)
• 1/2 cup glycerin 

As I posted last wednesday in my WOYWW post, I did get it to work with the leaf gelatine and I promised to post the recipe.

I first started to do some research on the internet, but couldn't find anything that told me exactly how to convert it. Then I figured I would just wing it, as it isn't an exact science. 

I calculated the volume Lindsay had and converted it al to the metric system and wound up with the amount in ml. I converted the comparative amounts of alcohol and glycerine and compared the lot with the gelatine recipe on the back of my package.

To make a long story short. It took several tries, because it first wouldn't come out of my "mold" and then turned out to be too thin. In the end I got it right and I had a plate that was both firm and came out of the mold with a little cheating.

Here's my recipe for leaf gelatin:

• 400 ml water
• 120 ml 96% alcohol (because I couldn't find 70%)*
• 110 ml glycerine
• 3 packets of Dr. Oetker Gelatine leaves (30 g)

* if you're using 70% alcohol, you have to add more alcohol and less water.

I put it all in a bowl and brought it to a boil for about a minute. Which isn't necessary, but I did it anyway. Let it cool a little, because I lined my mold with plastic wrap and I wasn't sure how warm I could make the plastic wrap. 

That's my little cheat, with this plastic I can lift it out of the mold really easy. 

The first two times I couldn't get it out, so I had to remelt the gelatine mix. The remelting is really easy and should you damage your plate in any way, you can just remelt it and repour in your mold.

Now with this recipe your plate will not be as firm as the actual gelli plates are, but you can easily add more gelatin to the mix if you want it to be thicker. For me this works just fine and the surface of the plate is really firm. As I intend to keep it on a hard portable surface, I'm not concerned about it breaking, but you might want to change that.

My plate is still going strong even after the abuse it took last week, with me trying out all sorts of things and refusing to put it in the fridge. Even though the temperature was really high for several days. As you can see, I keep it on a kitchen board on top of the plastic wrap. The "cracks" you see are the plastic wrap underneath the gelatin plate.

I'm now playing with my prints and a really cool technique of treating the print, to make them just to my liking. 

I'm distressing them with distress inks and I love how this looks. I haven't seen this before, so the result sort of took me by surprise...a nice surprise I might add.

I hope you find my recipe useful and should you have any questions about it, please let me know and I will try and answer them.

Thank you for watching and I wish you all a lovely weekend.