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Still Going.....

The CD case you see here will one day house a photo compilation as a wedding gift. But for now, it just needs to dry! :) In the meantime, I'll share with you how it's done!

I used my FAVORITE Cricut cartridge and cut out "Once Upon a Time" as the introduction to a lucky couple's fairytale. I did the title cut in purple and the shadow cut in navy and then tapped the sides with brown cat eye ink to make the title stand out. The BEST part of this project though was the MESS I made making the background paper. That's what I'm excited to feature today. If you click on the pic to enlarge you will see that the background is slightly shimmery. That was an added bonus to doing this project and one that I didn't expect AT ALL. Here's the low down.

Knowing that I was going to be wanting a "crinkled", aged effect, I picked a paper that was slightly thinner than regular cardstock because I'm going to get it wet and the thinner stuff will dry with a nice "crinkle" much easier. I actually grabbed a patterned paper that I got on sale for like 5 cents/sheet. It was super thin and perfect and I didn't care about the pattern on the back. I then stamped the back/white side of the paper with Stampin Up's French Script stamp. Now for the fun! I covered my work surface with a plastic table cover so that I could easily make the mess and then clean it quickly without causing too much damage. I grabbed my Adirondack pearl acrylic paints by Ranger in wild plum, stream, espresso and terra cotta (which, by the way are a perfect match to Tim Holtz's alcohol inks with the same color names), some paper towel, a sponge brush and the lid to a take-out container with about a tablespoon of water in it. I saturated the brush with water, applied a pea size amount of the wild plum paint and just covered the stamped area. I then quickly toweled the paper to sop excess moisture and repeated the process with espresso and terra cotta. Amazingly, every time I wiped the paper with the paper towel, it would soak up the moisture but left the pearlescent sheen. It was a pretty great effect! But knowing that stream is a dominantly bright color in contrast to the other colors I was using, I skipped soaking the sponge and only added a dab of the paint that I then stippled in a random pattern on the page and used the paper towel to blend. I ended up with the most amazingly beautiful paper!!!!! It was actually the paper that dictated what this project was going to be. This paper was SCREAMING for the Storybook cartridge!!! :)

Here's a closer pic of the paints... a great shot I might add because I never took the price tag off a couple of them. I can assure you though that I DID NOT spend $3.99 for these. While I know now that they are totally worth it, I bought these like two or three years ago when a local craft store was going out of business and haven't ever used them until today! I typically don't use paints, but suddenly had a change of heart today. It is guaranteed that I will be using more of these paints in the future. Today I give Ranger Adirondack Pearl Acrylic paints a high five!

One last note, the butterfly came from a CTMH Butterflies set that I stamped in Stampin Up's Night of Navy ink on the treated paper to be a shadow under the bug's wings. I then stamped the butterfly again with a versa mark pad on the purple paper I used to cut out the "Once Upon a Time" and heat embossed it with my shimmer embossing powder. I then cut the butterfly out and glued just the body to the page leaving the wings to flutter off the page. I applied some Stickles (of course) and a quick bling to the page and I was done. Click this link HERE for a great tutorial for the butterfly done by The Pink Stamper (note to self: "You REALLY need that Hannah Montana cartridge!!!")
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