Back from holiday and crafting already!!

Hello all of you lovely crafters!

I am very sorry that I have been slacking in my team duties as far as crafting goes but I swear, I have a good excuse! You see, I have been away on a long 3 week holiday to visit my family. It was a great trip and I am really missing it right now after being back for almost a week now but the feeling was lessened when I came home to find my dt stamp for this month from Julie at JB Crafting Supplies amongst all the bills and junk mail. You can guess which out of the stack I opened first!

The stamp I received was this fun little collage stamp by Stampendous called Film Elements. Truthfully, I had a bit of a struggle with this one, but then again I always struggle a little bit with collage stamps as I am one who likes to create a collage from scratch. I like having individual elements to a stamp from which I can pick and choose and decide the order in which I would like them placed on the card in front of me. Regardless, I had fun colouring this in and I hope you enjoy what I have done with it in the end.

Starting out I stamped my image with black archival ink onto white card as I knew I wanted to use a watercolour technique. I had played around in my head with doing it completely vintage but this time I decided to bring in some colour. I used Barn Door, ripe persimmon, squeezed lemonade, crushed olive, forest moss and peacock feathers for the film strip. I sprayed a bit of perfect pearls gold shimmer water on my craft mat and used that blend the colours out so it gives some gold shimmer to the finish.  I used the same colours on the lights and watered them down to paint over the whole thing, to give the illusion that they are actually shinning down on the set. I used pumice stone for the directors chair, the cone and the clapper thing (you know what I mean!) and ran my archival ink around the edges in a rough manner so as to give it a slightly grungy border.

Here is where I struggled a bit. I wasnt sure which direction I wanted to take with this image and even went a little splatter crazy on a card with my distress paints. I liked the overall effect of it but in the end I felt it was a little too busy and was taking away from the image. I finally chose to go for a black and white look which I thought would accentuate the colour in the image itself. I chose a piece of plain black card and used the clapper part of the stamp only to create a sort of subtle background with clear embossing. I placed this piece in the background and got to work on another bit of embossing with this 'Inspire' definition stamp from Visible Image that I felt was really appropriate for making a movie. I stamped this onto black card and embossed with white stampendous embossing powder (this is one of my favourite whites so far) and backed it with some leftover shimmer card from my splattered mess from earlier. I arranged all of these pieces on my square card, staggered with some foam adhesive.

At this point I was pretty happy with how it was turning out but I had wanted to add some fim strip ribbon that I had purchased a while ago that I rarely got to use. Of course when I have no use for it, I am always coming across it. As things usually go, though, when I wanted to use it, it was nowhere to be found! So I had to come up with a different solution. I had been given some card candy a long time ago when it was really popular (it may still be, Im not sure) and I had these black and white ones with some writing on them. I decided to use 3 of the black ones down the side to fill in the black space there and I am pleased to say I think it worked out well. So here is the finished product, I do hope you like it.

 I will leave you with this sunrise from my trip. This was taken the last morning I was there and it looks to me like the sun was waving goodbye. Enjoy.

Sam.