Cousins

It's been a crazy busy month...and even though I've been making plenty of fun things...I've been completely lazy about posting/blogging about them!  I've been doing a ton of resin work making items for the shop, and while I'm getting ready to blog about some of them, most of them are still curing and I'm working on making sure our inventory is high enough for our grand opening in the next few weeks, so that's taking a little bit of time away from posting everything.

In the meantime, I did move over to my scrapbook desk to work on this cute little LO.  This is a picture of several of my nieces and nephews right around the time school started this year.  I also have another LO on my desk now so that both the momma's can each have a memento of this day!  

Here it is:

This was made using the Tres Jolie Kit Club September kit and I really loved the nostalgia that the papers brought to me.  It was very vintage with lots of little "old school" flower and garden type designs.  However, the papers also had quite a bit metallic elements to them and I really like how that modernized the look of the papers just a bit.  

Below you can see one of my flower clusters.  Since I am still trying diligently to whittle down my flower collection, I was able to supplement the beautiful flowers from the kit with several flowers from my stash...and I'll do so on the matching LO as well!  😍

The kit came with some black chipboard from the Tres Jolie store and I altered the chipboard using a mix of white paint, Tim Holtz metallic stains, and a light pink embossing powder from Lindy's Stamp Gang.  I was a little surprised, but pleasantly pleased when I saw how pale the pink embossing powder turned out at the end.  But it matched the background paper perfectly so I'll take it!  You can also see some of the modeling paste I stenciled on to the background using a very delicate flowery stencil!

And that's it, a pretty basic LO, but still lots of tiny elements and, of course, featuring some of my favorite people!  😍

Till next time!

xoxo, 

Mel

 

Shabby Chic Dream Catcher

Hey, y'all!  I'm still getting settled into the new house, but since the craft room is really the most put together spot so far, I keep taking breaks from the rest of the house to go make new things!  I'm also still going through several craft kits that I've had lying around for far too long!  I know most of the stuff from this project came from a (relatively) recent Tres Jolie kit, but I'm not sure which month.  The kit came with an embroidery hoop and I immediately had the idea to layer lots of cheesecloth inside the hoop and see how easily it would hold medium.  

Years ago I saw someone make a tutorial where they made a texture similar to canvas using cheesecloth and either gel medium or gesso (or both) so I drew most of my inspiration from the project from that long-lost seen many moons ago tutorial.

Anyway...here is what the finished project looked like:

I "measured" out some cheesecloth and made sure it was big enough to fit into my hoop.  I wanted plenty of overlap so I could make the edges look a little "wispy".  After I got everything locked into the hoop I went to town with gesso, crackle paste and other textures until I got plenty of texture on my background.  I used a few sprays, stains and paints from stash and then started decorating around my texture.  Below you can see where I used a stencil and some texture paste, as well as a few flowers and some microbead.

I'd had this butterfly from Renea Bouquets sitting around for awhile and even though it was a lighter shade of blue than the rest of what I was working with, it fit nicely.  As you can see, the layers of cheesecloth held microbeads outside the hoop even where there wasn't a thick layer of medium for them to sit on (nice surprise for me! 😍)

I added a Renea Bouquets beautiful board and some more flowers on the other side of the hoop.

And of course, even more flowers, microbeads and spritzes of color! 

Overall I was really pleased with how this turned out, but (as always) I want to go buy more embroidery hoops now.  I'm going to be patient though...I really feel like as I continue to unpack boxes a hoop or two will show its pretty little face! 😂

Thanks for looking!

xoxo,

Mel