Monday, February 8, 2016

Mardi Gras French Country Initials

Bonjour mon amis!  It's one of my favorite times of the year.  Mardi Gras season and Easter!!!  Love oh love me some Easter.  It seems everything old is new again, the tulips and daffodils bloom, and the trees begin to bud, it's just wonderful.  You can't help but to smile knowing the reason for the changes...Jesus of course!  I am so inspired by these events and the fact that I need to get some projects done, that I did some initials. And what better paper to do them with but...Graphic 45's French Country!  Talk about needing Jesus, I'm really going to need a double helping of Jesus when my French Country paper stash is done.  Since it's no longer in print, I've been making everything I can think of with the paper; so whenever I look around my craft studio and my house I will always see it.

As stated above the letters are covered with Graphic 45's  French Country Collection,  I used #4500638 "Montage" and on the back; I kept it plain and covered the letters with Graphic 45's An ABC Primer Collection #4500384 "Calico Kids".  A couple of the wonderful qualities about Graphic 45 paper is that you can mix and match styles and colour.  The Letters were a very light coloured wood.  I purchased them from JoAnn Fabric.  I love these chunky letters because the bottoms are shaved flat, no need for adding a base (unless you want to). When you sand the paper edges on them, you don't destroy the letter trying to get your paper flush with the edges.  I use stain on my letters instead of acrylic paint, it gives a more natural and polished look. For these letters, I used Tim Holtz distress stain Vintage Photo.  I used his distress ink to do the edges of the paper after I sanded it flush on to the letters (I used Mod-Podge to adhere the paper to the letters).  I don't like to cover up too much of the patterned paper, so I used minimal embellishments.  Sometimes less is better.  I used some wooden flourishes that I picked up at Michael's, the pearls are from JoAnn's in the bead isle.  They come in a small pack with pearlized Autumn colours like chocolate, sienna, forrest green, light green, tan, and terra cotta.  The Mardi Gras mask charms I got from Hobby Lobby.  They were silver, so I applied some gold Rub-n-Buff to bring them in-line with the colour scheme I wanted.  The feathers are from JoAnn's and the flowers are from two different Prima collections, I  picked those up at Hobby Lobby. All of the supplies I had in my craft studio for quite a while, I took something old and made something new.  I made the wooden embellishments at the bottom of the letters by covered up some wood chips with some 6x6 French Country paper pad scraps. Since they were so tiny, I just used my Tombo Mono liquid glue to adhere the paper to the wood chips, sanded the edges,  and inked them with Vintage Photo and viola! instant matching wooden embellishments.

I love how the letters came out, they look great on my shelf.   I was looking around for a challenge to enter and I found one at Altered Eclectics, this is a challenge blog run by Ellapu.  It's really nice because it's only for altered art and mixed media, NO cards, ATCs or the like.  The challenge runs until the end of the month, so you have plenty of time to join the fun.  I love altering things so this was right up my alley.   Thanks for stopping by, enjoy the pictures, and I hope to see you in the challenge!  Til' next time, Your Grace the Duchess (Joyce).
Laissez le bon temps rouler!
Heureux de mardi gras!
 

 

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