Mixed Media flower garden with THREE Sale-a-Bration items

It’s a long one today, and a surprisingly complicated project. No, you haven’t come to the wrong blog, I just fancied a change!

For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by mixed media techniques, but I wasn’t sure how to blend it with Stampin’ Up!® products. My dabbling began with my foray into texture paste but it wasn’t until this week that I had chance to have a proper play. 

But where to begin? Of course, Pinterest came to the rescue. Pinterest has really opened my eyes to a lot of new techniques. Sometimes I just click the search button and then “DIY and Crafts”… it’s amazing what you discover this way! 

This time, I simply searched “mixed media” and after browsing a few blogs, this is my first attempt, which takes inspiration (pinspiration!) from this blog post. Despite normally leaning towards the clean and simple style, I really enjoyed creating this project and it turns out I had almost everything I needed in my SU stash, as you’ll see from the supplies list below. I even managed to include, count ’em, THREE Sale-a-Bration items - can you spot them without reading the list below?

The great thing about this sort of project is that it’s very difficult to go wrong. Well, I say that, but Sunday’s attempt ended up on the fire! 

Happily, today’s project was a little more successful, so here’s a step-by-step guide to creating this project. No pictures, I’m afraid, I was having way too much fun!

1. Cut a piece of watercolour paper to 12.5cm square and wet it
2. Using Coastal Cabana and Wild Wasabi re-inkers diluted with a tiny amount of water, paint rough horizontal stripes across the paper. You can add more to strengthen the colour if you wish. Allow to dry, or speed it up with a heat gun
3. Take some bubble wrap and ink it up with Coastal Cabana at the top right. Repeat with Old Olive at the bottom. 
4. Stamp the solid stem from Lotus Blossom (SAB) in Garden Green. Stamp a few more with the less solid stem, stamping off as required. I also sponged a little Garden Green in the bottom two corners to fill in some gaps. 
5. Punch out six bird wings from Flowerpot DSP, and one 3/4” circle. Doodle around the inside edge of the circle. Arrange the wings to resemble a flower and stick them down. Doodle around the edges. Put the circle of DSP to one side for now. 
6. On Very Vanilla cardstock, Stamp “Our friendship is a very happy thing” from the A Happy Thing stamp set (SAB) in black ink. Cut out the words and adhere them to the project. 
7. To get the newsprint effect, you will need real newspaper. Tear into small pieces, then apply smears of Mod Podge (Tombow might work, too – I didn’t try it) roughly to the background. Put the paper, face down, to the Mod Podge and rub it with your bone folder to transfer the ink. Gently peel back the paper to leave the ink behind. You may end up peeling away some of the colour but this doesn’t matter. 
8. I found that I had some shiny patches around the newsprint so decided to Mod Podge over the whole surface. This takes some time to dry and gives the whole background a slightly glossy effect. 
9. Apply sequins (I simply pressed these into the Mod Podge).
10. With the Chalk Marker, doodle around the sequins and words.
11. To make the frame, I glued some Typeset DSP to some Very Vanilla cardstock (using the glue stick) and used the two largest dies from the Square Framelits set to cut out a frame. Ink it with Baked Brown sugar and then press the whole lot into a Versamark pad so it can be embossed with clear embossing powder. 
12. Cut some grass from Old Olive cardstock using the Fringe Scissors, then taper the ends with your Stampin’ Snips. Stick this behind the frame (I used washi tape).
13. Attach the frame to the front of the project using Stampin’ Dimensionals, cut in half (Ha! Like I don’t do that all the time!).
14. Using the In Color Accessory pack (SAB), separate some of the threads from the Hello Honey twine and thread through a Tangelo Twist button. Attach to the DSP circle and then to the project. 
15. Mount your finished piece on a 5 1/4” square card base of Kraft cardstock.
16. Make a cup of tea and have a sit down before having a go at another one!

tams# 2911

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