On The Cover ................ not quite!

Hello Everyone,

I hope this evening finds you refreshed by the recent rain but not downhearted by it.  Personally, I am so relieved it has cooled down although my craftroom/conservatory has still been unbearably hot.  Oooh, I'm such a spoil sport when it's hot!

Well, tonight it's my turn to post my project for this month and as Sue correctly guessed from my earlier teaser I chose Hels Sheridan's 'On The Cover' project from the April 2011 issue of Craft Stamper for my inspiration together with the lovely colour palette Judith chose for us to use from Rachel Jackson's Designer Palette in the May 2011 issue.  I didn't adhere strictly to Hels' wall hanging because I didn't use the Craft Stamper free cover mount stamps but instead spent ages going through my stamp collection to find the ones I wanted to use.  I did use one of the cover mount stamps but the rest were a mix from Chocolate Baroque, Paper Artsy,Creative Expressions and Inkadinkado for the main Stampbord images, Stampers Anonymous for the background script and finally a new company called IndigoBlu for the crackle background on the canvas.

The first problem I encountered was finding suitable ink colours in my quite substantial collection.  I actually had both the Umber and Burgundy inks but one was a cube and the other a cat's eye and both were so old they were too dry to use so I had to look for alternatives. I finally settled on Coffee Archival, Parchment Paris Trunk and Aged Mahogany, Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain Distress Inks.

 

I love working with Stampbord so inking and stamping the tiles before covering them in UTEE was a real pleasure to do.  I do have a question for any Stampbord experts though.  I really enjoy doing the highlights with a scratch tool but even though I usually give the piece a blast of the heatgun to make sure the ink is thoroughly dry, as soon as I cover it with UTEE the highlights just about disappear and it really annoys me.  If anyone has a tip on how to stop this happening I would be grateful to hear it.  I actually forgot to sand the edges of my tiles before embossing them, lol!

 

To colour the middle of my canvas I found it was taking far too long (and too much ink from my precious pad) using the Parchment Paris Trunk so I mixed a very pale creamy colour from some acrylic paints and covered my canvas with that before inking round the edges with Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain.  I used a babywipe to take some of the ink from round the edges as I wanted it to look patchy.  I did this instead of the UTEE that Hels added to her canvas edges and also stamped the fine crackle (I stamped off onto scrap first so that the ink wasn't too dark).

I used a Chocolate Baroque flower stamp in two sizes to make my Grungepaper flowers and then filled the middles with Glossy Accents before adding some tiny gold beads.  I had the perfect beaded fringing in my stash plus the gorgeous steampunk butterfly and a lovely crystal type drop and finally some Ideology bits.  The other mistake I made (hmmm, they say confession is good for the soul, lol) was forgetting to punch the holes in my canvas board BEFORE I stuck the tiles on.  I had a heck of a job getting the Crop-a-dile at an angle that wouldn't damage the tiles when I squeezed to punch the holes.

                                    
Well, that's my offering for this month.  I thoroughly enjoyed making this so thanks to Rachel for the lovely colour combo (even though mine is not quite the same) and Hels for the project inspiration.  As always thankyou for visiting and for any comments you have time to leave.  I don't think it will be long before the next one of my buddies is ready with her project so keep an eye out for the post.



Hugs
Lesley  Xx

PS   After publishing the post I noticed that the pics are a tad blurry but if you click on them the zoomed images are fine.  Xx