Project Seven

Back onto the project book, and here is project seven, titled Steampunk Fairy and designed by Sam Poole. Here is the original design.

The one thing that struck me about this is that, while it is nice, it hardly fulfils the criteria for steampunk. Still, rather than try to make it more steampunk I decided to follow the original design, with a few changes due to availablility of items. Here is my version.

The only stamp I had that I thought was suitable was a Gorjuss one so I stamped that twice, once on some Christmas newspaper and once on plain card. I coloured it with promarkers, then cut out the book and the dress from the plain card and glued it onto the book card. I do like the way you can see the words through the face etc. I decided instead of a card I'd make a tag (seems ages since I've made one of those) so I didn't add the stencilled words on the background. I added vellum wings to the girl (in retrospect I would have used black, not brown ink, as it would show the detail better)

The main point of this project for me was the background. According to the instructions, you had to put distress stain in a few colours (I used red pepper, mountain rose and butterscotch alcohol inks which may have led to the problem I had) onto a craft mat, spray them with water to activate them and then swipe your piece until it's covered. However, alcohol inks seem to be more absorbent than distress stains, so it absorbed it far too quickly. I compromised by soaking the tag in water, dropping the ink over it in various places, then leaving it to dry. I then stamped a crackle stamp in brown ink, and used picket fence paint for the bit behind the girl.

The words are remnant rub ons attached to grungeboard which was painted with barn door distress paint, then sanded, inked with brown ink, and the edges inked with black soot paint.

Overall I really like this piece. I think the background has worked better the way I have done it. I still need to work on the way I colour things (youtube videos tare available to teach you this stuff but it's actually looking them up!)  I'm also loving the background stamp; it's the first time I've used one and now I can see that it adds an as yet missing dimension to my work.

Happy crafting

Emma x