Door Plaque {with JoFY Stamps by Marie Hampson)

Hi! Marie here. I was so pleased to be asked back to show you all another project. Today's is a door plaque for my daughters room using the very pretty JOFY stamps.

I started off with a rectangular piece of MDF. This was actually an old door sign from my son's room but you could basically use whatever you have as anything on it will be covered up. I dug out a load of scraps of patterned paper (never throw anything away!), tore them into strips and stuck them to the MDF. Once it was dry I painted over the whole thing with Blush Fresco Finish paint and painted the sides with London Night.

Then followed a few steps of stencilling different sized circles with Rose, Very Berry and Claret paints, working from the lightest shade to the darkest, and keeping the darker circles to the edges of the sign. The edges of the sign were edged with Squid Ink paint.

I then stamped the border grass and flowers from the stamp sets JOFY 09, 24 and 21 using black archival ink. I stamped these straight on to the sign. As the background wasn't entirely flat a few of the lines needed filling in - I just used a bog standard black fineliner pen for this.

JoFY 09

JoFY 24

JoFY 21

You can see from the photo that I started painting the leaves in on the sign, however I changed my mind and decided as the background was coloured it wasn't looking quite how I wanted it to. I stamped the same images again on white smoothy card and painted the flowers and leaves with various Fresco paints: Tango, French Roast, Tikka and Chartreuse (part of the Lin Brown set), Pumpkin Soup, Hey Pesto, Smoked Paprika, Blood Orange, Zesty Zing and Old Gold. These are mainly translucent paints so you can happily paint the stamped images without worrying about obscuring the stamping too much. You can always water the paints down a little if you find you're covering up the outlines more than you wish.

Once dry, I adhered the cut out images to the sign over the original stamping.

The stamps then came out again and I stamped pretty much all of the flowers, bunting (on some patterned paper) and the letters from my daughters name (I cut the letter stamps up, but if you can't bring yourself to do that then just mask off the letters you don't need or stamp them all and leave the ones you don't need for another project).

I roughly cut up the flowers and had a bit of play moving them around the sign until I was happy with which flowers I wanted to use and where I wanted to place them. Using the same paints as before I painted my chosen flowers and then cut them out - a very fussy job I admit! If you don't fancy the fussy cutting then you can always do as I did before and stamp them straight on to the sign.

After sticking the letters to the bunting flags, I stuck the bunting flags to the sign along with the flowers and some extra leaves from JM12 to hide the bottom of the flower stems.

JM12

I added some Perfect Pearl dots and some highlights with a white Posca Pen but still felt it needed something else. I had a dig around and decided on using the cute little birds from JM20. Again, they were stamped on smoothy card and then painted with London Bus, Limelight, Yellow Submarine and Beach Hut paints. They look perfect sat on the bunting!

JM20

I hope you enjoyed this project and hopefully it's inspired you to do one yourself!

Marie.

 A huge thank you to Marie from all at PaperArtsy HQ. This is a gorgeous sign for Freya's room, and would work equally well in other rooms. One with a relevant title would look wonderful at the entrance to a conservatory. The circles in the background make it all look so very dimensional, without being overpowering. It's a great idea to layer up lots of stencils with the same shape just different sizes. We love those quirky birds eyeing each other up. 

If you would like to join in our weekly challenge with any of this week's guests who have blogged since Sunday night, then join in to link up your creativity HERE you will go in the draw to win PA stamps of your choice! You need to link your entry by17:00 (London time) Sunday 6th July 2014