When I read that Sarah and Lianne were on their way to CHA in the summer, I hoped (and requested!) that they would order some of the Crafter's Workshop templates for the shop. My wish came true and as soon as they hit the store, I popped some in my basket for this month's blog work.
I love how you can create your own backgrounds with masks by just using some mist or ink, but I also wanted to explore the effects created by using different media and also going beyond backgrounds and finding other ways to incorporate the patterns into my pages.
The three masks that I worked with were:
Tile Texture
Chickenwire
Chickenwire Reversed
Layout 1: Say Cheese
I firstly took the chickenwire template and very lightly inked, with a black distress ink, through the template onto my background paper. I did have a bit of a practise first on a scrap though, to work out how much pressure and ink to apply to create such a subtle effect.
Using the same template, I decided to try embossing a die cut shape to make my own embellishment. So with an asterisk shape which I cut from kraft card, I stamped with a watermark ink and sprinkled with aqua Zing! embossing powder (details of all products can be found at the end of this post).
This created a pattern on the shape which coordinated perfectly with the Echo Park papers that I had picked out for the layout.
The completed layout which documents how difficult it is to get the 'perfect' photo of my three children as they get older:
Layout 2: Feed the Chickens
The chickenwire templates also inspired me to make an embellishment. Using the Reversed Chickenwire template, I painted through the template with some brown acrylic paint onto a piece of kraft cardstock. With the paint, I could make some areas darker and thicker than others and add some texture/lines with the brush as I applied it. Using my die cutting machine, I designed a tag shape with a chicken shape placed in the centre of it. I then laid the tag with the negative chicken-shape over the painted card, moving it around until I was happy with the pattern showing through. If you look closely you will see that I tried to find a join in the lines to fit where the eye should be.
My children love to feed the chickens at a farm that we often stay at in Wales and this tag made the perfect embellishment for my layout all about how much they began by just feeding the chickens but on our most recent visit, actually went right into their house to find freshly laid eggs for breakfast.
Layout 3: The Big Ones
Whilst making my chicken tag, I also cut out some people tags too. I experimented with using a watermark ink through the Tile Texture template both on top of the people shapes and also onto some scrap kraft card.
I heat embossed after covering with a layer of pale blue and pale pink embossing powder.
Whilst the embossing powder was still hot and a liquid, I sprinkled some aqua onto the blue and some dark pink on to the pale pink before heating again to set both colours. This created a mottled effect as shown below.
I've kept the embossed people for another project, but for my last layout, I used the pattern on the kraft card to back the cut out people-banner tag shapes.
Not wanting to waste any of the embossed pattern that I had made, I also used a Martha Stewart pinked circle punch to make some small embellishments to keep for another time too.
The blue boy and pink tags feature as embellishments on this final page. I repeated the banner shapes across the centre of the page with strips of the patterned paper. I took this photo of Evie and Oliver a few weeks ago on Evie's birthday. I love how happy they look together and made a page about how close they are and how much Oliver needs his big sister now that he has started 'big school'. They're now collectively known at home as 'the big ones'.
I hope that I've given you some ideas for using masks/templates in some different ways on your layouts or other projects. As ever, thank you for reading.
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