April Rain

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Hi friends,

It always takes a push to get me back creating and blogging these days.  I wish it wasn't so, but I'm afraid it is (at least until we get to September and get started with my annual 12 Tags of Christmas).  Here I am again, filling in over at Frilly and Funkie.

The current challenge is April Showers, but I chose to make my piece April Rain.  You know, the cold sleeting kind that we sometimes get instead of those happy light April showers?  I have a couple of friends who lost dear loved ones this month and wanted to do some sort of sympathy piece as a tribute.

I gravitated back to my favorite type of background that Wendy Vecchi created a couple of years ago - rubbing alcohol and archival inks.  I absolutely love the way these backgrounds turn out!  For this piece, I rubbed a Cobalt Archival ink pad on my craft sheet and spritzed it with rubbing alcohol.  I dragged a piece of Ranger Specialty Stamping Paper through the puddle, trying to keep it toward the top half of the sheet, then it was dried it with my heat tool.  I did that several times, drying it between each application.  The process was repeated with Cornflower Blue on the bottom half of the sheet.  I wanted the darker blue at the top to look like thunder clouds.

Once I had the background layer done, I randomly stamped Wendy's Script background stamp, rolling it instead of stamping flat, with Jet Black Archival Ink.  I didn't want full coverage.  Next a sympathy sentiment was stamped with a stamp from Wendy Vecchi's Card Art Sentiments.

After that, Wendy Vecchi's White Texture Paste was applied at the top right over the Tim Holtz Ornate Stencil.  (Just a small kudos to Wendy here on the jars she uses for her Texture Pastes - they keep the pastes moist for much much longer than most other brands.  My paste hasn't been opened in at least 3-4 months and when I opened it, it was like a brand new jar!).

Anyway, back to the whites, I was going for sort of a heavenly eretheal feel with all the white that I used on the piece.  White was carried through by stamping the tree from the Wendy Vecchi Card Art Sentiemnts set with Glacier White Pigment Ink and white embossing it.

The piece was finished off by die cutting the sentiment strips from the brand new Tim Holtz Pondering Words die set (great set - 33 word strips to create your own taylored sentiments).  Also the Wildflowers 2 Thinlits die set was used to die cut white flowers that were tied with crinked seam binding stained with Colbalt archival ink.

So that's it.  I had several peaceful evenings in my craft room messing around with inks, texture pastes, stamps and the like.  I had a couple of false starts before this came to fruition, but I really enjoyed making it.  I hope you enjoyed visiting and learning about this piece.  Thank you very much for stopping by.



The above project was created using these products.  They are available at The Funkie Junkie Boutique where Ranger, Tim Holtz and Wendy Vecchi products are always sold at 20% below MSRP.

Ranger Inkssentials Specialty Stamping Paper 8.5 X 11	Ranger Archival Ink - Cobalt	Ranger Archival Ink - Cobalt Reinker	Ranger Wendy Vecchi Archival Ink - Cornflower Blue	Ranger Wendy Vecchi Archival Reinker - Cornflower Blue
Stampers Anonymous Studio 490 Wendy Vecchi Stamps - Script Background Stamp	Ranger Archival Ink - Jet Black	(February Pre-order) Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz Layering Stencil - ORNATE	Studio 490 Wendy Vecchi 8 Ounce Embossing Paste - White	Stampers Anonymous Studio 490 Wendy Vecchi Stamp Set - Card Art Sentiments
Sizzix Thinlits Die Set 30PK - Pondering Words, Thin by Tim Holtz	Sizzix Thinlits Die Set 7PK - Wildflowers #2 by Tim Holtz	Seam Binding