Friday 21 February 2014

Clarity Stamp Challenge 12 .... Love & Romance


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I decided that this month I would finally enter the Clarity Stamp Challenge and here is my entry.  The theme was Love and Romance and as my Clarity stash is quite limited still it was quite a challenge to come up with something!

I used an MDF heart I made on the laser cutter (I'm lucky enough to access one at school).  I then decoupaged it with white tissue paper and watered down PVA.  I overlayed this with pale pink and pink lace design tissue papers, with more white over some areas to tone the pink down. When doing this, you have to be careful not to get too much PVA onto the surface otherwise it will repel the ink. I used a paint brush end to poke through the hole while it was still wet. I dried this all off with a heat gun (mainly because I'm too impatient to wait for it dry naturally!).  I then blended some distress inks over the surface - I think I used warm lipstick and spiced marmalade, and butterscotch adirondack. When the tissue paper was completely dry, I sanded off all the edges around the heart.




Next, I used October's Clarity New Design Club Rose stamp (No 84).  Stamped it over the surface of the heart using versamark and embossed it in white.  (Remember to liberally apply talc over the surface first to remove any moisture that the embossing powder might cling to!).

Now for the tricky part.  Now from my experience, I am hopeless at stamping sentiments or verses accurately. They usually look if like I've been at the cooking sherry so when doing this one I had a moment of inspiration ... why not stamp onto white tissue paper and then carefully decoupage onto surface?!  It doesn't matter if it goes tragically wrong because I can just bin it.  I stamped the verse in versamark and then embossed it black embossing powder.  So far so good!  I then carefully tore round the edges so it looked nice and lay it down where I wanted it to go.  Then I carefully applied some watered down PVA to the surface.  Be really careful here not to press down too hard as it can wrinkle and tear.  I lost a bit of the 'r' in forever, but hey ho the rest of it was pretty good and because the white becomes translucent, you can hardly see the paper at all.


Now I am waffling on here, so I'd better get a move on. I stamped two each of the large and small Clarity Stamp Gerbera flowers onto Clarity theuva card using black archival and embossed them using black embossing powder.  I chose the gerbera flowers and coloured them in oranges because that is what I had in wedding bouquet ... see romantic! I inked the flowers using cut and dry foam in butterscotch and spiced marmalade.  I then used promarkers in reds, yellows and oranges to get the different tones.  I cut the outer petals off the two extra ones and glued them on top of the other ones using silicon glue.  I then glued them to the heart.







A little bit of peach ribbon to hang it up with and it is finished.  Hope you like it. It's a bit late to give to my husband for valentine's day but I'm sure he will love it anyway!

Have a great crafting week.
Ela x


4 comments:

  1. lovely project Ela and what a great explanation how you achieved the result thanks for entering and good luck

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  2. Beautiful plaque Ela. I particularly love the texture and colour of the background. x

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  3. Lovely Ela, great colours, textures and lots of interest for this lovely creation. Hope you have enjoyed entering the challenge and that we will see you again. Good luck.

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  4. This is very pretty heart and nice colours.
    Thank you for joining the Clarity blog challenge :-)

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