Wall hanging

I am setting a monthly challenge on UKStampers here. The challenge for this month open until 11th of February is to..."Use Metal, Material from old clothes, tissue and stamps to create a wall hanging. As is it January and it's a long time until payday you can't buy anything new - existing stash only."This is what I began with.

I always have a huge amount of jotters to carry to an from school and I had been using an M&S canvas bag featuring twiggy until it developed a huge hole in the bottom. I have used on side of the bag to form the top of my inking apron (more of that another day) and decided to use a piece of this and because it is such an iconic face to to use the Face but the mouth was a victim of the bag breaking. I had recieved an Art From the Heart parcel recently so used the red tissue paper from that to recreate her hair with texture and give her a more modern haircut.

I then decided to paint all over it with gesso as I wanted to change the colour...

As part of my Christmas money spending I had bought the Paper Artsy Grunge flower die and the Hot Pick HPXT02, partly because at some time in the past I had bought some metal and had no idea what to with it. I later discovered I should have brought tape and stuff too but improvised.

I cut out out the flowers and stamped them with purple stazon and then decided I wanted to add alcohol inks but forgot about mixing stazon and inks. The flowers looked great but I removed most of the stamping. This is one of the flowers I made using the silver but in the end decided copper tones would  work better. Daughter wants this as a brooch.

I then took Claudine Helmuths dotty stamp from the domestic set and stamped a blue Dylusion background that I highlighted with black posca pen. I applied pink and purple dylusions to the hair with my fingers and then painted on some very scary eyes. I wanted to change the face and make her something else which she certainly is - a little scary I think. Daughter came in and asked if she could have the hanging for her room as seems to be delighted with it. Here is the bronze flower.

I punched holes and set eyelets with the cropodile and then used some of the idealogy chain I won for entering a Tim Challenge on UKstampers. If you would like to enter the challenge (which is monthly) please pop over to UKStampers, it is just for fun and no prizes but already some of the pieces in the gallery are fab.

Art Journal Secrets

This was another prompt on UK Stampers but I have put off this one for weeks as I did not want to reveal my secrets... Then I realised I could hide the journalling under the tag. This is a very grungy distressed page and I had fun trying out different techniques.
I placed a layer of gesso on the page and then added distress inks. Where the gesso was uneven it has created a much darker scratchy layer that I really like. I used Paper Artsy stamps and I think the student book-keeping one is going to be overused. I added a ledger stamp from same range on the side of the page but embossed and stamped it in clear ink.

I crumpled, stamped and embossed a tag with di and mahogany distress embossing powder and added to page with journalling hidden. I then decided to try embossing/stamping keys with some success and then added alcohol inks over clear embossed areas. Letters from TH papers with distress crackle and ink  were then added.