Mementoes In Time

I thought I would share this piece I made for my precious Mum for her birthday. She turns a rather stunning 82 tomorrow, so I wanted to give her something that she could keep up on display for a while. This project is actually a display card with a stand, rather than a traditional card and I haven't added a birthday greeting, so she can keep it up past the actual date. This project started off as something else but as is usually the way with craft projects, it morphed into something else. These are always the most enjoyable craft projects, as the end result is a surpise!

Anyway, if you would like to read about this, please read below.

First off, I've cut a piece of chipboard and made a photo frame stand for the back and then painted the board with some brown acrylic paint. I was aiming for a distressed effect and I wanted this to be the base colour that shows through. When this is dry, cover the board with some Crackle Medium.

Then when that is dry, go over the top with a contrasting colour. I've gone for an off-white but you could use any other colour, a lighter one works best.

You can see the almost magical effect you get when the top coat dries and the base coat starts to appear underneath. I love this aged effect and you will see it popping up on the blog again I'm sure!

If you thought that bit was fun, this next bit making the flowers was even more fun. I've punched some scallop circle shapes from paper. I've used five pieces when cutting from plain white paper and four pieces for each flower when using handmade paper, because it is a bit thicker. Then, I've punched a hole in the centre of each scallop and scrunched them up in my hands to make them really crumpled.

Next, I headed for my Distress Ink tin and added colour to the front and back of each piece. Simply layer them up, pin them with a brad, give them another scrunch together and carefully open them out to form each flower. This is really satisfying and the effect is simply stunning. The best thing is you can make your flowers to match your project. I got so carried away with this, that I made heaps of them!!

You can add some clear embossing powder to your flowers to give them a sheen or even some drops of Glossy Accents Dimensional Glue to look like little drops of dew.

I've glued my flowers to the board with some ribbon and beading. The centre piece is just a piece of co-ordinating paper with a stamped message and I've ripped the edges of the stamped piece with a neat little distress tool that I picked up at a craft show. So there you have it, a simple but really fun project to make for your Mum or special friend, or maybe just a display piece for yourself. I'll be covering the dress form in another blog post, so stay tuned if you want to hear about that.

Thanks for reading