Hassle Free Marbling

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for your response to yesterday's post. I'm sending a copy of all your messages for Anne to her in hospital so she can see for herself how much support she has.

A quick post today to show you this journal, altered for No. 3 son's birthday. He doesn't have a passion for a subject at school or hobby at the moment but he does love animals, so this former steampunk gentleman has become an old fashioned ringmaster replete with performing beasts.

I took inspiration for the base of the cover from Candy Colwell's Spooky frame, covering it with an initial layer of crumpled tissue before layering on Distress Paints, stencilled embossing paste and gilding wax.

Taking part in CC102 has given me even more enthusiasm for utilising stencils, and as you can see here, after employing some masking of the main images a number of stencils were layered to add that circus/carnival feel to the background.

A hint here - if you want to 'bleach' areas having coloured them with deeper Distress Ink colours, paint on Antique Linen Distress Stain, let it dry, a little then blast it with your heat tool to allow the base stamped image to become clearer.

One of my favourite parts is the inside cover. I was lucky enough to win my choice of a new stamp from The Artistic Stamper and went for the Marbled Background. You will be seeing much more of this as it is an easy and far less messy way of creating those wonderful marbled backgrounds people usually achieve with inks and shaving foam. Here I used it with Distress Stains before adding some more ink through a Dylusions Stencil  and using another fabulous stamp called Smudge Background which gives you a distress look without having to go to the trouble of spritzing/flicking. Finally some washi tape added some much needed structure to the pages.

I will be entering this into this month's Artistic Stamper Creative Team challenge - Alter Something and highly recommend you consider adding these two background stamps to your collection.

You will never be stuck for coordinating backing papers again!

Time to leave you for now with the promise that there's much more on the way.

In the meantime please take care of yourselves.

Hugs, Jenny xxx