Crafters Companion 11th Birthday Week Blog Hop

Yay! Who doesn't love a birthday party!! Crafter's Companion are celebrating their 11th Birthday there's lots of information and fun going on on their special Birthday Facebook page, why not pop over and join in the chatter  and they've organised a fun 'pass the parcel' blog hop as part of the celebrations as well.

The blog hop starts today and finishes on 30th October at 9pm; you can hop and comment as and when you like but as this is a Birthday blog hop there have to be pressies......wouldn't be a birthday without pressies.......so each day Crafters Companion will announce 'where the music stops' and you will have a certain amount of time to pop over to that blog and leave a comment. Then a winner will be picked from all those who have commented within the set time frame and they will win the actual item that has been created by that particular blogger.

The projects everyone has created for this blog hop feature products launched during the birthday week, details of all the products, tv show times etc can be found in this e-brochure.

I've used Sheena's fabulous new Time Traveller collection which is part of her Perfect Partner range, this launches on Monday 24th and if you like Steampunk then you are going to love this collection!! I've used it to create this 8" mixed media calendar canvas......

I intended to do a step by step with photo's but I was bad and got so carried away making it that I forgot to take most of the photos! So I'll just talk you through........hope that's okay!! 

I started off by laying die cut pieces onto the canvas to get an idea of composition and taking a photo (yes actually took one of this stage!), I'll often do this, it's an easy way of remembering a layout....

Then I glued everything in place, apart from the propeller flowers, the dragonfly and the calendar, using tacky glue. You need to make sure all your background bits are well glued down, don't worry if a bit of glue shows because you're going to gesso over the whole thing. Once everything is glued add some areas of sand texture gel in areas around the canvas and set aside to dry.  After a few hours the glue and texture paste should be dry and you can coat the whole canvas with a layer of white gesso. the reason you need to paint with gesso is that it helps to seal everything but more importantly it unifies the surface meaning that when you add the colour it will react in the same way all over the canvas.

Whilst the gesso is drying you can get the propeller flowers and dragonfly ready. (NOTE: Dragonfly is not part of the time traveller collection its from an earlier collection but I adapted it with parts of the collection to create a mechanical dragonfly) So first off give all the parts a quick coat of gesso and add a few tiny areas of texture gel and dry with a heat gun. Then using the red and green AquaTint from the bright and beautiful set mix up a rusty brown and roughly paint splodges of colour on......

Next using the teal colour from the same set paint the remaining areas.....

Give them a quick dry with a heat gun and then add a little pebeo gilding wax, King Gold and Antique Gold. I also added a few areas of clear sparkle pen, now you need to be light handed with this, just a few tiny areas.....less really is more in this case. A few spots just give the appearance of metal shining through too much and you lose the look. Then all you need to do is glue all the bits together to make your flowers.....

The background canvas should now be dry so using the same mix of red and green, paint over the whole canvas. Keep the colour very pale and use a baby wipe to help blend and wipe away areas of colour that look too strong. Use some gilding wax to highlight the cogs and texture paste, then catch the edges and some of the texture with some black permanent ink using a bit of cut n dry foam. Once you're happy with the background you can glue your flowers, dragonfly and calendar in place.  I then added some stamped sentiments from the collection and because you can never have too many cogs (well that's my excuse) a few more cogs but this time cut from black card and coloured with gilding wax.

Hope you like it :) Don't forget to check out all the other blogs and remember when the music stops there's a prize up for grabs!! Here are all the other blogs on the hop.......

1 Crafters Companion

2 Linda

3 Bianca

4 Angela

5 Donna - ME :) You're here!

6 Rach

7 Loti

8 Mel Jess

9 Marie Jones

Have fun everyone :)

Thanks for stopping by

Donna xx