She Who Must Be Obeyed - here at last! (posted by Lesley)

Well, after promising to have my project posted by today, I thought I wasn't going to manage it. I've had to change my original idea a little because I wanted to print a couple of photos and my tired old printer decided to choose today to give up the ghost. After messing around with it most of the morning I realised I was going to have to think again and then this afternoon we had an unexpected visitor so I had to put my project on hold again but when I finally got round to it tonight everything fell into place and I managed to get it done.


I really am pleased with this project, the inspiration having been taken from Helen Chilton's lovely article in April's Craft Stamper and I decided to make my wooden cube into a photo holder. I have to thank my crafting friend Elaine's husband for the original cube and poor Elaine for carrying it all the way to Alexandra Palace where we all met at the beginning of the month for the Big Stamp and Scrapbooking Show. For the first time all four of us were together for the weekend and had two fab days at the show and a Saturday evening of crafty chat. It was brilliant!


I used the lovely new stamp plate from Elusive Images called Royal Fleur de Lis and to go with the stamps I found the gorgeous curtain hooks in B&Q together with some Fleur de Lis wooden moulding pieces that had been quite dramatically reduced. I painted the wooden moulds with black acrylic paint and then with some Paper Plus Gold Glaze (another bargain I picked up for half price a while ago). I then blended Distress Inks onto the panels I had cut to cover the cube and stamped the images using Archival Black and Coffee. Oops, little edit here as Jo asked on my previous post how I had done the diamond stamped panel. It was Black Soot DI embossed with Black Distress EP.


I then dabbed the edges of each panel with Versamark and embossed them with Ranger Queen's Gold EP and also stamped and embossed some of the crown images and cut them out. I stuck all the panels to the cube and arranged the crowns and the wooden Fleur de Lis on the side panels.


I then turned my attention to what I wanted to display between the hooks. Originally I wanted two little photos of my granddaughters and spent ages this morning finding suitable ones, cropping them and changing them to black and white, only to find the printer was caput.


So, plan B - I found two suitable images from a Crafty Individuals pad and gave them the DI treatment. I then cut two Nestie Fleur de Lis frames, dabbed Versamark round the edges and embossed with the Queen's Gold again.


I did this in a very patchy fashionn for the effect that I wanted and then stuck the frames together back to back. I added the CI images that I'd chosen, gave them each a little crown and finally sprayed some black and white Prima lace flowers with Glimmer Mists and added these to the frame.


Although I enjoyed our two previous CSQ projects, this has definitely been my favourite to date and although I was very late starting, it just seemed to flow together once I bought the Fleur de Lis embellishments.


So thank you very much for being patient and I hope it was worth waiting for, Lol.

Hugs
Lesley Xx