Beat the Christmas Rush - April

Yes, I am really late for April BtCR, the new challenge opens tomorrow! 

There are only two cards this month.... I stamped four images, then had the brilliant idea of using two of them decoupaged on top of the other two.   This was not one of my better ideas ..... very fiddly to cut out, and I'm not sure that it looks better than the original one layer image!

The stamp is an old Graphicus one, I have had it for years and always regretted not getting the Christmas Rose in the same series before they ceased trading.  However I have discovered that the people behind Graphicus, who now run  Chocolate Baroque, still have these images in their range :-)  So I have ordered the Christmas Rose and the Hydrangea, they also have Mistletoe, Poinsettia, Daffodil and Rose - a search for 'script' will find them.
I stamped and embossed the image in gold before colouring, and finished off the card with some ribbon.

Treasure Chest for an 8 yr old girl

Little Girl's Big Sister had been admiring my collection of Primark junk jewellery which I buy to pull apart and use as embellishments. She especially liked this key and I asked her if she would like me to make her a treausure box with the key to decorate it. Her eyes lit up, "ooh yes please!" she said :-) That was just before Christmas, and I glimmer misted the box in pink and a bit of purple ........ then put it to one side and promptly forgot about it in all the rush to get Little Girl's album finished.

Yesterday (Sunday) was handover day, and on the Friday before I had remembered the box and realised I had better get on with it, as Big Sister was bound to remember! So I overstamped the box with flourishes in pink stazon and at that point it looked really pretty ........ then I made the fatal mistake of thinking it needed a few darker flourishes. So I over stamped in what I thought would be a slightly darker colour, a purple. Oh dear :-( it was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too dark, but once I had done one, I had to stamp all over as I had started in the centre, not a nice sensible place like a corner where one dark flourish might have looked OK ..... oh no.

So having ruined it, what to do next??? I had intended to use two or three of the flower cut outs which I had found lurking in a drawer, so instead I decided to cover most of the box with them and hope that the swirly stamping would look like an intentional background LOL. I also punched out some butterflies from some green gingham paper and put a few of those on.

The art of flat decoupage is to make it look as though the printed images are almost painted on, this being achieved by several coats of varnish - the edges of the prints are supposed to disappear ....... well I didn't quite manage the 'perfect' decoupaged surface, but after four coats of varnish I thought ...... that'll do ......!

I put a tiny screw-eye at the end of the box to hang the key on, and that was it! It doesn't look too bad, even though it is so pink and flowery LOL, a shame the light was so bad when I took the photos, it does look better IRL. Big Sister loves it :-)

Mirror, mirror, on the wall......

I haven't blogged for a while, mainly because I have been trying to make progress on a piece of cross stitch :-)

Last weekend was November craft weekend, so I thought I would decorate the second of my Ikea mirrors. I had bought some decoupage papers at Ally Pally and decided this would be an ideal use for them. My original plan was to alternate the darker colour with two paler ones, but when they were all overlapped, the darker one showed through the lighter on the overlap and it looked quite odd. So I covered the whole mirror in the darker paper and used one of the pale ones on top to look like broken shards of mirror glass :-)

The swirly corners were painted in acrylic and then sprayed with glimmer mist. The mosaic tiles were left over from another project and I only had ten - spent a while trying to work out how to use them all to best advantage! A frame of flat back pearls completed the front. I hadn't wrapped the paper over the edges very well, so I stuck a strip of metal all the way around!

It was quite difficult to photograph - one pic with flash and the other without, hope it gives you some idea of how it looks!

Two down, one more to go......

UFOs (UnFinished Objects)

I have several UFOs stashed away in various places, many of them stitching projects, but there are other things too :-) One of them, a decorated box, has been lying around for months, taking up space on my craft table and just generally getting in the way - it wasn't worth putting away because I "was going to finish it soon". Finally, after a good shove by Sy ("do it NOW!"), I put the final touch to it, which consisted of two coats of varnish. Yes, that's all it was awaiting, for all that time. Procrastination is my middle name.........

Anyway, the box itself is a wooden one, painted and decoupaged. I wanted to use some Christmas images which I had bought as a pack a couple or three years ago and not really made use of. First step was an acrylic primer, then two coats of cream emulsion. Then I chose my images and overlapped them on top of the box, sticking them down with PVA glue. When dry, and when I had made sure all the edges were firmly stuck down with no air bubbles under the image, I started to varnish. It would have taken fewer coats had I not overlapped them, but I did like the effect, so six or seven coats later....... the top was done. Because I had used a polyurethane varnish, the box had a yellowed tint to it, a really nice effect, but it did mean that the bottom half of the box looked noticeably different from the top even after 4 coats. That's when the project ground to a halt, as I kept putting off doing those final two coats! But now it is finally done, and I have plans to do some more decoupage, I had forgotten how much I like the effect.

Now all I have to is think what I am going to put in the box, come next Christmas......