Meant To Be

OMGosh, talk about 'serendipitous'! The ladies at Just Add Ink are having mixed media cards as their challenge this week, so what could I do but play in my craft room and get inky! 

Here's my entry:

The background was made with ink 'smooshing' (very technical term), then I stamped over it with the music stamp in ripe persimmon and sponged through the trellis stencil with seedless preserves. Vibrancy of colour was preserved by using micro glaze - gotta love this stuff. The last steps were to sponge the edges then paint it with crackle paint and wait for the magic to happen!

And that's when things started to go wrong...

My first coat of crackle paint wasn't thick enough and even after drying overnight, no cracks appeared. Naturally, I added a second, thicker coat and after drying a while, sure enough thousands of tiny cracks appeared and gave it a gorgeous distressed look. Unfortunately...as it dried more, it actually started to peel off, and - what's even worse - took the top layer of vibrantly coloured ink with it! Aaargh! But we crafters are nothing if not resourceful, aren't we? So I scraped it all off (though you can still see bits around the edges) and added some die cut pieces that are a sort of reverse of the stencilling, and just went with the flow. Sigh! 

I cut the frame from three layers of white card, stuck them together then 'aged' them using inks and paints. This technique is a LOT of fun, lol. As luck would have it, my bestie and I had made a bunch of these wildflowers when she came to visit over the weekend, so I had them on hand already. More serendipity! Once all the elements were prepped it was simply a matter of assembling them on my card front. 

Materials used:

• stamps - Sheet Music (SU), Attic Treasures (Tim Holtz)
• card - watercolour, very vanilla, white, crumb cake
• distress oxide inks - spiced marmalade, ripe persimmon, seedless preserves, vintage photo, bundled sage, lucky clover, scattered straw, carved pumpkin
• other Tim Holtz products - trellis stencil, Wildflowers #1 dies, water spritzer,  distress micro glaze, antiqued bronze distress paint, tarnished brass distress spray stain, collage medium matte, clear rock candy crackle paint, archival inks in vintage photo, ground espresso and black soot, Splat box
• other - heat tool, scalloped rectangle die, Big Shot, paint brush, linen thread, Dimensionals, ink spritzer tool, trellis die

So all in all, not the card I had originally envisaged but I'm happy with how it turned out. 

Thanks for calling in. Stay safe.

Cheers

Kez