Southern Girls Challenge - Flowers

Well spring has sprung, the lambs are here and I had to give way to a mother duck and her ducklings crossing the road yesterday.  So as the theme for this month's challenge over at Southern Girls Challenge Blog is flowers I have in homage to spring moved away from my usual projects and created a cute little gift bag using all recycled materials.  Here is the finished project:

I took a plain old cereal box and because it was quite flimsy I paper mached the whole thing inside and out with newspaper.  Once the newspaper was dry I covered the whole thing with crumpled tissue paper to give everything a bit of texture.

Once everything was dry I added more texture using texture paste through sequin waste in random spots over the box.  I then made a wash of yellow acrylic paint and water and covered the whole thing.  I sprayed spots of distress stains in yellow and blue, dryed it all off then I used black acryclic paint through a couple of Tim Holtz stencils and red paint on bubblewrap to add interest.



For the flowers I used a Sizziz dye to cut flower and leaf shapes out of recycled tissue boxes.  I added some pieces cut from corrugated card, some left over pieces from artificial flowers and buttons. The stems were cut from the tissue box as well.

The handles were taken from a recycled gift bag and the sentiment was cut from a left over piece of black card.  

I am happy with how it has all come together and it is nice to do something a bit more playful than my usual projects.  Please pop over  to the Southern Girls Blog to see the other amazing projects from our talented design team and please feel free to enter the challenge with a project of your own.  I look forward to seeing your projects on the blog.

I have entered this project in the challenge at:
Altered Eclectics

NZ Papercrafter Mega Card Swap

I am a member of a Facebook Group called NZPapercrafters and we are involved in a card swap at the moment.  We are using very large playing cards purchased from Mitre 10 Mega.  These card are A5 in size so give us plenty of room to work with.  The idea is to make four cards each time, keep one, swap three and get three back from other people. These can then be bound into a book.    The rules are simple, any style we like, include a quote and our name somewhere on the card.  Here is my first card.

My name and details are hidden in the little tab on the right.  And here are a couple of close ups.

The Mirror Crack'd Mask Challenge

The theme for the August Challenge at The Mirror Crack'd is "Masks"

Our theme for this month is Masks

Susanne is hosting this challenge and she will be choosing our Winner and Top 5

This challenge is sponsored  sponsored by

WOODWARE CRAFT COLLECTION

With a prize of £12.00 to spend at your favourite Woodware Stockist, either in store or on line.

 

Woodware are a Yorkshire based family owned business, as well as distributing Dreamweaver Stencils and Stampendous Stamps we have a wonderful range of stamps designed for us by Francoise Read and Jane Gill. We also scour the world for new and innovative products for the crafty card maker, and have a great range of punches and tools of the trade, to find stockists in your area or to see the range visit the website www.woodware.co.uk.

Our design team are playing along with the challenge so check out our blog, which is there for inspiration at www.woodware.co.uk/blog.

The theme of "masks" can be interpreted in many ways, not just a masquerade mask. It can be masks in stamping, painting, mixed media - well you get the ides. So get your thinking caps on and head on over to the blog to post your project. We all look forward to seeing them.

 

Here is the mask I made for the challenge.  

 

 

 

To begin I started with a plastic mask that I had brought some time ago from the local $2 shop.  It already had a lot of texture on it so I thought it would really lend itself to what I had in mind. I painted the mask with black gesso.

Then I began glueing various bits and pieces that I had lying around to the mask. I did not really give this too much thought I just grabbed pieces as I went.  I have used paperclips, game pieces, metal embellishments, charms, chipboard die cuts, buttons, beads and pieces of old jewellery.

I then gave everything a couple of coats of black gesso making sure everything was well covered.

 

 

Once the gesso was dry I sprayed it with metallic paints and then drybrushed it with more lumiere paints.

 

 

 

 

The pictures do not do the piece justice as there is a lot of shimmer and shine on the project that the camera does not capture. I am really happy with how this turned out and I hope it will inspire you to join us over at The MIrror Crack'd to see what the other talented Design Team members have made and also to make a project of your own and join in.