Panic stations and an all nighter

On Friday I went to the Range with my mate Tracy.. it was her wanting to go not me and I very kindly offered to take her!!  She ended up spending next to nothing.. I came home with a new kitchen bin, craft paint, a new paint brush and a (silly cheap) a4ish canvas and easel.  I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the canvas and easel and set about aging the easel, texture pasting & gessoing the canvas.. then it all went wrong.. after making a lovely background with distress stains in browns & greens I went to add pumice stone over an area I intended stamping a statue (I was going for old lost garden theme) and to my horror I found that the stain had turned TURQUOISE!!  Ruined, wrecked and calamity springs to mind!  No amount of gesso would cover the turquoise and no other ink would hide it either, couldn't use acrylic paint because I needed it to be able to take ink and didn't want to lose the texture of the canvas :o(  In the bin it's gone.  Shame, I'd spent ages blending colours and adding texture, I'd even stamped and painted the image on tissue ready to wax in place.  Easel looks good though and I'm sure I'll find it handy for photoing cards on.

One hectic Sat & Sunday later and I have to start a new project.. wasn't going near canvas again so I decided to alter an ikea tolsby frame and turn it into an advent calendar.

Butterscotch, latte & terracota alchie inks on some felt, followed by gold with blending solution soon had the glaring white frame looking like 1950s bakalite!  


Next came 12 tags, 3 1/4" by 5".  All using distress inks as background on both sides (there's a lesson in how you have to keep the mat clean).  The project had to be done and in the post by this am so I ended up pulling an all nighter and eventually finished at about 4am.  Hubby not impressed lol.  Ideally I'd have spent a good couple of weeks making multilayered tags with lots of texture but 24 tags in one day means I had to sacrifice something so I went with simple stamped images, occasionally embossing, stamping with glue & foiling, glitter, paint & gems.  Sounds like I went to town but divided by 24 it meant most tags were like this one, nowt fancy bar a few pearls added to the image.





This one had a bit more work involved.  StampinUps lovely as a tree stamped in black archival then versamark before being embossed with white ep.  I used TH white marker to extend the ground and SU white ink to emboss lots of snow flakes.  The numbers are all diecut using a very old Spellbinders font set.  

With the benefit of hindsight I wouldn't have used terracotta on the frame because it clashes most evilly with some of the tags, specially the cool toned purple & blues and there would have been more thought into the tags but over all I was reasonably happy with how it turned out.  Next time I think I'll turn the frame into a recipe holder... just got to find some decent cookery themed stamps to make it with ;o)