Mixed Media Monthly Challenge #9 - Think Pink

 It's time for the February Mixed Media Monthly Challenge. This month our theme is "Think Pink." Just make any type of mixed media project that has pink on it somewhere. How fun is that?

Our sponsor this month is the awesome online retail store Ellen Hutson. They are giving our lucky random winner a $25 store credit!! You can get so many mixed media art supplies with that. Remember, you must enter to win!

We also have an amazing Guest Designer this month. One of my favorite crafty friends, Teri Anderson. She has made a beautiful mixed media card for this challenge that you will love!!

I ran with that theme and made a 6 x 6 project on thick chipboard with pink on it everywhere!!! I made the background with patterned paper, spray inks, stencils, Gelatos and silver rub-ons. For the edges I colored some Faber Castell Design Memory Craft Whipped Spackle that I colored with Gelatos. I just put some on a palette knife and rubbed it along the edges to make a frame effect. I love to do this. It adds lots of texture to the piece and finished off the edges.

I cut the outline of the heart on burlap using a Maya Road heart mask. Then I sprayed and sprayed and sprayed it with ink sprays and used the heat gun in between to speed up the drying time. I experimented with different ink sprays and the best were the Adirondack Sprays which are made for fabrics. They showed up the most on the burlap. After I got the colors I liked I sprayed the heart one last time with Smooch Spritz. You can't see it in the picture, but it makes the heart sparkle.  Then I used some Cosmo Cricket words finish it off with a sentiment. I outlined the edges of the words with a Distress Marker and adhered the heart to the canvas with a hot glue gun.

My Top 10 Favorite Projects of 2014

I noticed that many of my fellow crafty bloggers are posting their Top 10 Favorite Projects of 2014. I thought that sounded like fun, so here are my Top 10 for 2014. I'm hoping to be more crafty in 2015 and I'm wishing that you and yours have a very Happy New Year. I think 2015 will be the best year yet!!

My favorite She Art Girl. I loved taking Christy Tomlinson's She Art Class.

A very Tim Holtz 4th of July tag, covered in Sparkle Mod Podge.

The journal page I made for the 1st Mixed Media Monthly Challenge.

An altered box I made for a challenge at the MMMC.

A card I made for the MMMC using lots of textures and Copic Markers.

A tag I made for a Prima Doll Halloween Tag Swap-
I love how the spider web background turned out.

My favorite card of the year. This card was originally a PaperCrafts reject,
but I entered it into the World Card Making Day Contest and it was a winner!!!

I love this image and sentiment by My Favorite Things.
I had so much fun watercoloring this card.  

Just a bright and cheery card made using DCWV stamps and papers.
One of the first I made in my new craft room.

I worked a long time practicing my Copic coloring on this Unity image.
I just think it's pretty.

The Mixed Media Monthly Challenge #5 - Ribbon, Twine and Fibers

It's time for our 5th Mixed Media Monthly Challenge!1 This month our challenge is to use Ribbons, Twine or Fiber in your Mixed Media Project. Our sponsor is May Arts and they are generously offering 3 full spools of fall inspired ribbon to our lucky random winner. 

This month I made a Halloween canvas. I colored the background with different paints in halloween colors of orange, green, purple and black. I used some stencils and stamps and made sure to cover the sides. I used the spider web stencil designed by Mona Pendleton for My Favorite Things as a main accent. I sprayed adhesive and covered the web with black glitter. I used some gold glitter on the Time Holtz 31 silver numbers and attached them to the canvas with small black brads from Stampin' Up. I also stamped a Tim Holtz spider on the bottom of the "1" in Ranger archival black ink. 

I had a bag of glittered Halloween shapes from K&Company that I used for the haunted house, spiders, skulls and accents on the word tiles. I added some black ink and goggley eyes to the spider. To make the word tiles I painted some Tim Holtz grungeboard shapes with Distress Crackle paint in Peeled Paint and then rubbed Distress Stain in Tea Dye on the tiles. The letters are Tim Holtz grungeboard letters that I covered with a mixed purple blend of Stickles. On the bottom of the canvas I added a black web-like trim from May Arts and on top of it I added the gold mesh from May arts (see bottom picture for a close up). I love the texture these fibers add to the canvas. 

This canvas was so fun to make. I hope you are inspired to make something really cool this month. I can't wait to see what you come up with!!!

The Mixed Media Monthly Challenge #2 - Around the House

Yay! It's time for the second Mixed Media Monthly Challenge.  I hope you had a chance to play last month, but if you didn't maybe you can join us in July. All skill levels are welcome and you can make anything like a canvas, card, scrapbook page, altered item, journal page, etc... You just have to use more than 2 art mediums. Our challenge for July is to use something around the house in your project. You can stamp with bubble wrap, mask with rubber bands, or use old book pages in your background. Just use something you can find around your house someway in your project. Be sure to let us know in your post what household item you used and how you used it. Be sure to check out the blog post for more examples and tons of inspiration from our design team and our fabulous guest designer (gotta click over to see who it is!!).

Our sponsor this month is the awesome company Die Cuts With a View or DCWV.  They are offering an awesome prize for our random winner. More of a reason for you to play. Every player has the same chance of winning the big prize, unless you play more than once, then you have a better chance at winning it all!!

This month I decided to make a canvas.  It's kind of a large canvas for me 9x12. I started by adding pieces of DCWV papers to my canvas. Most were from the Vintage Collector stack, but I also used some from their Textured Paper stack. They were nice enough to give me a couple of stacks of textured papers and some amazing stencils!! I also added some ripped up Dixie bathroom cups to the background - they're hard to see. That's one of my around the house items.

Then, I covered the background with gesso to soften the colors. When it dried I added several sections with the DCWV stencils. Then, I carved a 5 sided shape from a wine cork to make a stamp and stamped it randomly in yellow over the canvas. I also used a plastic bottle top to make the blue and white circles on the canvas.

The corrugated flowers are from Magenta and I colored them with acrylic paints. The centers of the flowers are pieces of cork from a wine bottle that I cut into small pieces. I also colored the corks with acrylic paint. The stems are from small and long scraps of Tim Holtz grunge board I was hoarding. I cut the piece into three sections and colored them with a Stampers Big Brush Pen. I die cut the leaves from a piece of cork and added color to them with the same Big Brush Pen. This canvas was so much fun to make. If you've never made one, I challenge you to go get a canvas and get started. There are no rules, just use colors and products you like and do whatever you feel like!!! Thanks for stopping by!

Christmas Card Challenges #27

It's time for a new challenge at Christmas Card Challenges. The theme this week is to use stencils on your card. I love to use stencils. I made the background of this card using Dylusions spray inks. Then I used the Dylusion Snowflakes stencil with Mr. Huey's Opaque White Spray Ink. I like that the white is opaque so you can really see the stencil images well when you spray on top of the other inks. Then I added some white canvas letters. To make them stand out I outlined them with a black Stampers Big Brush Pen. The ink bled in to the letters which I kind of liked, but some of them got too dark for me so I colored the insides with a white Stampers Big Brush Pen. I brushed the edges with Jenni Bowlin Chalk Ink Edger in Black Coal. This is a kind of a nontraditional mixed media Winter Card, but I like how it turned out.

Easter Inspiration Blog Hop

Welcome to the Easter Inspiration Blog Hop by The Inspiration Crew.  This hop is just for fun. We’re posting projects we made using products we like and hope they will give you some inspiration for your own Easter craft projects. You will find links to all the other participating bloggers below. Hopefully you can find time to look at all their blogs and leave comments on any that inspire you. Happy Easter Crafting!!

Here's the Easter Bunny Canvas that I made using mostly Tim Holtz products. The grass is Tim Holtz Tinsel. For the sentiment I used Tim Holtz Kraft Core Seasonal Impressions paper. It's so much fun to use this Kraft Core paper - you just sand it down until the words look like you want. For the background I used Tim's Shabby papers and covered with a layer of Gesso. The doodle stamp on the top is from My Favorite Things. The flowers were colored with alcohol inks. The bunny die was painted with Tim Holtz Crackle Paint and then covered with alcohol ink and the bow was covered with Worn Lipstick Distress Stickles. You can find Tim showing these techniques on his web site www.timholtz.com.  Thanks for stopping by and be sure to check out the rest of the hop!

Donna Bowman 

Rachel Kleinman

Ardyth Percy-Robb

Jennifer Cuthbertson

Veronica Zalis
Geri Greening

She Art Girl 1

I know I'm about 3 years late, but I'm finally taking Christy Tomlinson's She Art Class. She put all her older workshops on sale and I took the opportunity to take her Color Class and the first She Art Class. I love to watch her videos on You Tube, so this class is right up my alley. She had about 10 videos in Week 1 and I loved watching all of them. The first girl we made was very simple and I'm looking forward to week 2 when we add more details. But, since I'm not the least bit artistic, it was good for me to start off with the simple version. 

I CANNOT draw, so I was a little scared when I started, but she did such a good job of explaining how to do things that I think I did ok. We didn't really draw anything except the hair and chin line. That was daunting enough for me and I will say that I was really happy with the shape of the hair. I'm just glad she doesn't add facial features!! 

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to stop back by this Sunday for the Easter Inspiration Blog Hop. It will be filled with fun and inspiring Easter Projects.

Unity Friends with Flair Friday

I made this little canvas using Unity Stamps for the Friday Friends with Flair Challenge. The dressform is from an Angi Blom Itty Bitty stamp set called Mind & Body {dressform} and the words are from a Donna Downey sentiment set called Empowered Words. I created the background using Distress Paints, Stencils, Modeling Paste, Faber Castell Stampers Big Markers, Washi Tape, and Stickles. I colored the dress with Copics and added a few small pearls for a necklace.

Prima Paper Doll Canvas

I bought some of the Prima Paper Doll stamps a few months ago and this is the first time I've used one. I've been watching lots of mixed media canvas tutorials lately and I really wanted to try out some of the techniques I've seen on a canvas.

I covered this canvas with tissue paper from Christy Tomlinson, who is one of my favorite mixed media artists. Then I sprayed with Raspberry and Cornflower ink sprays that I made using Color Box reindeers. I loved that when the sprays spread out they made purple areas. Then I added some washi tapes and stamped in Raspberry, Cornflower and Black inks with different background stamps. I added some different Distress Paints on the edges of the front and on the side.

I colored the girl with Copic markers and added details and outlined her with Black Big Stampers Pens.  Adhered the girl with Modge Podge and the wings with Glitter Modge Podge although you can't really see how sparkly they are in person. I also added some purple pearls and a gold sparkly bow to her.

I added these cute glittery hearts on sticks that I thought looked like flowers to the bottom left corner. Then I looked around for something green like leaves and I saw these pompoms and thought, why not? They might not be leafy, but they are green. I printed out the words and cut them and outlined them. Finally I added some blue glittery start at random around the canvas.

This might not be my most favorite thing I've ever made, but it was so much fun to make and I can't wait to experiment with more canvases in the near future!! Thanks for stopping by!!