Gothic Butterfly AVJ Just stain it

Hi Everyone,

Firstly hello to my new followers, welcome aboard.   I am so excited I can hardly keep my feet on the ground following my July Tim's tag win with Bees Knees  and my pin worthy badge for Dies and Distress at A Vintage Journey, it has been a wonderful weekend.  

 

With new challenges come more new projects and today I am showcasing a piece of wall art that I have had great fun putting together for the new challenge at the fabulous Tim Holtz inspired challenge blog A Vintage Journey. This time the challenge has been set by Jenny who wants us to Just Stain it, basically use the distress stains in different ways on our entries.  The challenge is sponsored by, Country View Crafts who are offering a £10 gift voucher to one winner who will be chosen by the incredibly talented team of Vintage Journey Guides. 

 

I received Happy Mail this week from my adopted big sis Anne and it was the new Gothic stencil whoop! whoop! I just love this and you can see straight away that I have used it on the background of this project.

 

 At first glance my stains are not that obvious as there is lots of texture in my project.

 The background started with water being spritzed onto an 8" x 8" piece of thick card and then a mix of Stormy sky, shabby shutters and broken china and brushed pewter distress stains swooshed over it then dried.   I used texture paste through the stencil, right around the edges to make a border (this had to be done over a few drying sessions so I could match the pattern up without it spoiling).    When it was dry I put some stains into spritzers and spritzed the same colours as before over the texture and dried.  Finally I dabbed it over lightly with Blue Hydrangea and cactus green stayzon to give more colour over the silver near the edges.    

 

 



 

 The Butterfly was cut and embossed from cream card with the layered butterfly set and I used stormy sky distress stain all over it and dried it thoroughly.  I used Versafine to dab lightly over the raised areas and then sprinkled frosted crystal antiquities over it and embossed with a heat tool.  I dabbed broken china, shabby shutters and stormy sky over the butterfly, which gave it a lovely mix of colours and the ink caught over the raised embossed areas and made them darker.  This looked nice, but the detail was being a bit lost, so again I decided to use the brushed pewter stain to pick out the raised areas.  I spread some distress stain on a craft mat and rolled my brayer  through it a few times until it just started to get tacky, I then rolled it over the raised areas and this caught the detail.

 

 

The centre plate that the butterfly is mounted on is a piece of sticky backed natural canvas over mount board and I used the brayered stains technique (Tim shows the technique Here on his July 2013 tag).  The edges were darkened using Pumice Stone stain.  I used two smaller pieces of canvas to use for the sentiment which is stamped with Hydrangea archival Ink.  A piece of Tim's linen ribbon was stapled to the canvas using my tiny attacher and the sentiment hid the staples.  I frayed out the edges of the linen ribbon to soften the effect.  I originally wanted 'Butterfly' somewhere on the project but then decided to use just the first and last letter using the alpha chips edged with pumice stone stain and glued into place in such a way that it looks as though the rest of the word is under the butterfly.   The body is decorated with one of Tim's metal arrows.

 

 

I found this frame at a car boot sale ages ago and it has been hanging around (as things do) waiting for the right project to fit into it.  It was just bare wood and I ran over it with antique linen stain to bring it more in line with the colour of the canvas and then rubbed a little Picket Fence stain over some areas with my fingers and then did the same with  pumice stone stain over different areas and to blend in with the darker wood grain.

 



 

Distress stains are so versatile and can be used in many different ways on your projects. Check out my friend Anne's inspirational post Here to give you a few more ideas.

 

Thank you as always for your visit an lovely comments

Mo x