Altered Pencil Pot

Today has been one of those really lovely days when you close the front door and forget the day to day stuff whilst spending the day getting lost crafting with friends!!  I’ve been at Belstead House with the girls from the Kesgrave Craft Club and I always look forward to and thoroughly enjoy these days.  Jacqui had given us each an mdf pencil pot as a challenge for the day and I knew that I wanted to create something for the June Happy Daze Blog challenge.  The theme this month is ‘June Bug’ and needs to be insect inspired.  I won the £15:00 voucher last month and to say that I was thrilled to bits is an understatement!  I am also going to enter this into the Simon Says,,,,Anything BUT a Card challenge.

My first step was to add Ranger snowcap acrylic paint dabber to the rim of the box, once dry I added brushed corduroy distress ink over the top of the paint.  Next I cut 4 pieces of card from the Tim Holtz kraft resist paper stash and went about altering each piece with various colours of Tim Holtz distress inks and Dylusions stencils.  I also gave each piece a spritz of the Tattered Angels black cherry glimmer mist.  Once I was happy with the pieces, I attached the paper to each side of the pencil pot using Claudine Hellmuth multi-medium gloss and then painted it over the front of the paper as well to seal the inks in place.

I decided that I didn’t want to use my pot for pencils so instead I used some Jenni Bowlin journaling cards as templates to create butterfly, heart, flower and bird shapes from kraft card stock.  I used a mixture of distress inks, marshmallow glimmer mist, background stamps, stencils, pens, gems, pins, rock candy and stickles to cover the kraft card stock and embellish.  I used 2 Tim Holtz journaling tags and 2 different stamps for the sentiment (one each side).  Finally I attached the 2 sides of each shape to a kebab stick and placed each stick into the pot using some brown tissue paper and raffia to hold the sticks in place.

The pictures below are front, back and a couple of close ups:

Thanks for looking!

Tracey x

Altered Heart Frame

So I finally finished the Bramford Crop Girls Challenge piece for June this week. This month Nancy set the challenge item and had returned from a holiday to America with a wooden frame from Michaels (oh how I wish we had this store in the UK)!

First I covered the wooden frame with Tim Holtz gathered twigs distress ink. Next I cut out the individual pictures from the 12x12 valentine sheet of Tim Holtz paper stash and arranged them on the frame.  Once happy with the placement, I cut them down to size where required, used distress ink round the edges and clued them in place using the Claudine Hellmuth multi-medium gloss, which I now use for almost everything. Once everything had dried, I sprayed Tattered Angels glimmer mist in marshmallow and black cherry in the bottom right hand corner then once dry, added Ranger distress crackle paint rock candy over 4 of the pictures. Again once dry, I then pained every paper picture with the multi-medium. To finish the frame, I went round the outside edges and the aperture with my gold Ranger acrylic paint dabber.

For the middle of the frame, I made a kraft card stock background which I cut to match the aperture.  I used brushed corduroy distress ink around the edge and stamped a Tim Holtz image down on side.  I then went over the stamped image with a glaze pen. I spritzed the opposite side with the glimmer mists. Next I created a flower using the Tim Holtz tatter florals die and kraft glassine paper using a tutorial in the July Craft Stamper magazine. As in the article I brushed distress ink over the crumpled flower parts, spritzed with glimmer mist and attached the whole thing to the heart background using a brad.  To finish the centre piece off I attached 3 pins and 2 clear beads.

Finally I stamped the 3 words using a Tim Holtz stamp on to a piece of kraft, covered the letters with the glaze pen, distressed the edges, layered onto another slightly larger piece of kraft and attached it to the bottom corner of the frame using double sided foam tape.

Thanks for looking
Tracey x