Add a Little Dazzle to Stampendous And Make It Beautiful

Hello Lovely Bloggers! I am so happy that you stopped by today - as we have a real treat for you in store!

 

This week the Design Teams at Stampendous! and Add a Little Dazzle Craft Metal Sheets are hopping together to inspire you and temp you to try out some cool new techniques and products! 

If you missed the earlier posts, here are the links for you for MONDAY and TUESDAY. The team over at Add a Little Dazzle has even created a special pack featuring the metals from this blog hop and you can find it here - Add A Little Dazzle Stampendous Hop Special. 

And we know you'd love to win some goodies, too! So we're giving away three prize packages this week for comments on the blogs. A nice package of Metal Sheets, Stamps and Cutting Dies - life just doesn't get any better than this, does it? lol :-).

   

Now onto my offering :). Earlier this summer I collected some sea shells at the beach in Brighton and I was really keen to make something with them. I love all things nautical and can never pass on an opportunity to pick up shells or pebbles whenever I'm by the sea.

And when I saw this frame in a charity shop I thought it would make a perfect setting for my shells. It had raised edges all around, which would work as a border for my 'shell mosaic'.

This is what the frame looked like before...

After I painted the frame with DecoArt acrylic paint I laid out my shells ready for setting in. As I didn't have any fancy mosaic stuff I raided my hubby's shed and found some Polyfilla. I spread generous dollops of the filler within the frame's recess, one dollop at a time, and just pushed the shells in.

Before the filler was dry I brushed on some Pearl-Ex powders and set it aside to harden. I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out but it worked perfectly. The shells were safely embedded in the frame :). Finally, I dry brushed gesso over the coloured parts, wiping the excess as I went, to create a washed out look.

I wanted to carry on with my nautical theme so I stamped Ship Elements and Navigateur onto white card with Cloudy Sky StazOn. Then I adhered some eyelets (saved from my old curtains) over the images to create ship's portholes. To add rust around the 'fixing bolts' I used Spectrum Noir OR2 marker, softened with alcohol ink blending solution.

And then I stalled... I had to put this frame aside for a while to let it 'mature' as I wasn't happy with the result. It was missing something... the oomph just wasn't there.

The inspiration how to finish it came unexpectedly when I stumbled upon this post on Jolanna's blog Miedzy ziemia a niebem (Between earth and heaven). I knew then I wanted to add a sail boat to the frame as my focal point.

And I knew that the fabulous metal sheets for Add a Little Dazzle would work with my metal portholes beautifully :). To create the boat I used a piece of drift wood and the sail came from a paper mache boat I bought at Hobbycraft.

To decorate the sails I cut a piece of Precious Pearl and Wondrous White metal sheets. I stamped the pattern from the NK Studio Grunge set onto the white sheet using Cloudy Sky StazOn. The pearl sheet was embossed with Tim Holtz Rays Texture Fades folder and I lightly sanded the raised parts. Then I simply wrapped the sheets over the sails - no adhesive was required as they as stayed firmly in place.

To fix the boat to the background I used a double sandwich of foam board scraps and Crafty Foam Tape.

Do check out the other terrific projects and leave us your comments! The designers so appreciate when you comment on their blogs. Thanks for hopping with us! Here's who is playing today:

Stampendous

Asia King (yours truly!)

Add a Little Dazzle

Jamie Martin

Lee-Anne Cross

Martha Lucia Gomez

Kate Capper

Lydia Brooke-Evans

Graciela Chavez

Keren Baker

Vicki Dutcher

Cathy Parlitsis

Thank you for stopping by and for all your lovely comments! Have a fabulously crafty week!

Big crafty hugs
 




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Challenges for this project:
Country View Crafts September - Nautical
Rhedd's Creative Spirit September - Anything Goes
Simon Says Monday Challenge - Rock the Techniques