Wall hanging with Scrapcosy stamps {by Liesbeth Fidder de Vos}

Hello everyone, Liesbeth here! 

This year on the blog, we have free reign to do a deep dive into a PaperArtsy product ranges of our choosing. For this post I have been exploring some of Raquel's PaperArtsy Scrapcosy products. A wonderful stamp set, a belonging stencil and some Scrapcosy printed tissue paper.

I decorated a wall hanging with it and I love to show you how I made it!

I am actually quite happy with the result! The stamps are perfect for what I had in mind. Now the wallhanging hangs in our kitchen :-)

My starting point was a ready-made wall hanging, consisting of three 15 x 15 centimetres panels, covered with nature pictures that I didn't like.

The stamp set I used is one of my favourites: Eclectica (Scrapcosy)15 (ESC15) and I used PaperArtsy stencil PS105 by Scrapcosy and some pieces of Scrapcosy printed tissue PT05

As I love to work with the three colours yellow, pink and blue (I often do) and I love Mattints I chose PaperArtsy Mattint Dragonfly, The Pink and the new Acid.

My plan was to cover the pictures of the wall hanging with stamped cards and to create a nice frame around them. So first I made the cards. I cut three pieces of  PaperArtsy Smoothy Regular white cardstock 12 x 12 cm, and coloured them with blending tools and Distress inks. I used Wild Honey, Picked Raspberry and Mermaid Lagoon, as I always do :-)

Using Tsukineko StazOn Jet black I stamped the different stamps (ESC15) onto the cards and some pieces, like the flowers at the tea cup, on a seperate piece of cardstock. At this stage I didn't know yet what I was going to use. I also cut masks for the tea cup and the postmark stamp.

I masked the two big stamped images and used the stencil PS105 with a blending tool and Distress Ink Chipped Sapphire. After splashing some water drops, wiping them up I accentuated the spots with a white gel pen to create ,stars'. I also used the gel pen for the text and for some other accents. Using watered down bleach, I bleached the images where necessary to let them pop out. I sponged the edges of the cards with black ink and made shadows around the images with charcoal. The card with the text was still a bit empty so I cut some of the stamped lace, coloured it and created a frame at two corners as shown.

Here you can see the bleaching and the charcoal shadows. The cards are ready!

Time for the wall hanging itself and how to put it all together!

It's all about the edges, the center will be covered. First I sanded the edges a bit, because it was glossy paper, and covered the edges with a few layers of gesso. I decided to do some crackling and I searched for the perfect background colour for it, I came up with a mix of PaperArtsy Fresco paints Twilight and Blueberry. Perfect, exactly the colour I was looking for! I painted the edges with the mix...two layers was enough.

One of my favourite PaperArtsy products is the Crackle Glaze! By far the best there is, it always works perfect and you can dry it with a heat gun, so quick and easy! I applied a layer of Crackle Glaze on the edges onto the blue paint and dried it, and painted the top layer with the opaque white Fresco paint Snowflake. Immediately the crackles appear. Magical!

Oops...there's some white on the ropes as well ;-) I will paint them black again later on.

A little bit of decoration on the crackled frames. I tore some small pieces of texts out of the printed tissue  and glued it onto the crackles with Matte Glaze (my perfect gel medium, I use it for everything!!) here and there with a soft brush. 

After drying I painted the crackled frames with the three Mattints Dragonfly, The Pink and Acid. For every board a different colour.

Very carefully I painted the sides of the boards with Fresco paint Little Black Dress and a small  sponge. It provides a nice finish.

I cut out the butterfly and lots of flowers I stamped before, and painted everything with the three colours of Mattints: Dragonfly, The Pink and Acid. I used a very small brush for this.

The finishing touch: I matted the cards on pink, blue and yellow cardstock and glued them onto the boards of the wall hanging. I added the little flowers and butterfly at the images.

The colourful wall hanging is ready!

Yellow..

Pink...

The entire piece..

and Blue!

In the following photos you can see some more details:

It was so much fun to create this wall hanging! I love the combination of the paints, crackles and Mattints. And of course the wonderful Scrapcosy tea themed stamps! Hope I inspired you, have fun!

Liesbeth XX

Blog: Liesbeth's Arts & Crafts
Facebook: liesbeth.fidderdevos
Instagram: liesbeth_fidder

2020 Topic #20 Drink Tea with ESC (by Ellie Knol)

  2020 Topic 20: Mason Jars

Can you imagine a vintagey kitchen complete with the gentle warm glow of a candle-lit mason jar just like this one? Ellie's stamped jar captures the vintage essence wonderfully and she has some useful pointers for what to avoid and what works well with adding texture and stamping.
~ Keren

Hi everyone, it's Ellie Knol from PAPER-STAMPS-COLOR  with you today, and I'd like to share with you the fun I had decorating this jar into a treasure, a keepsake.. or should I call it a candle holder for the kitchen, or maybe a air-tight container for teabags? 

I assumed that stamping directly onto the glass would be tricky, as I wanted to stamp right around the jar, with no space between the images. I chose to stamp onto rice paper! 

I had a hard time deciding whether I should color the images or not: so I completed the project without color, photographed it, and then added color. At this point I decided to show both versions.. 

I feel that both versions really enhance the beauty of the tea-themed stamp sets from Scrapcosy ESC13 and ESC15.

The lid has been decorated too... 
 

This teapot is the most prominent element in the stamp sets, a beautiful vintage one. Here  you can see the no-color version, 

..and compare it to the colored one.

Lace: yes, that's one element that should be considered in a project with these stamp sets. The black on the bottom of the jar is black gesso mixed with a tiny bit of Slate Fresco Finish paint. 

.. and a few brads and some hearts give the project some nice finishing touches.

I added some insects, the buttons were fussy cut from one of the collage stamped images. 

How did I do the stamping? I stamped with Versafine Onyx black and heat embossed in clear embossing powder. I tore the parts of the images I wanted to use. To make the image fit around the jar I tore off about an inch of the paper of the smaller teacup on two sides. I also tore off part of the script in the background.

What if we were to light a tea-light in the jar? This way it will be an eye-catcher in any kitchen.

Why isn't the rice paper see-through in parts? I painted the backside of the images with Cloud 9 Fresco Finish paint! The entire lid has been painted with it as well, after I glued rice paper onto it. Even the lace has been painted with this paint.

Is there any part of the project I particularly like? I think it is this part, but really, I couldn't choose. 

I hope I gave you some inspiration to decorate a jar or bottle, maybe as a gift?! A confession from me: there were a few stages of trial and error in decorating this mason jar. I used Mod Podge to decoupage the images to the glass and that was quite easy. I then had this luminous (not!) idea to give the glass a frosty look all over with the Mod Podge using a brush. It was a disaster, it went all streaky and when not applied very quickly, the brush would remove a previous layer or part of it.

I had to clean the glass, bit by bit to not disturb the images. In the process one of the buttons got lost. I might try this again some time but then apply it with a sponge paint roller.

As always, I learned a lot and enjoyed the creative process.

Get creative and .. have a good day; take care!!

Ellie Knol

Blogs: http://elliecreahoekje.blogspot.nl/
and     http://ellieatcs.blogspot.nl/ 
Owner of : https://www.facebook.com/groups/DutchArtJournal/  
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008479362838 
Pinterest: https://nl.pinterest.com/ellieknol/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellie.knol/

2019 #15 Coral: Vintage Botanical Tea with Scrapcosy Stamps {by Raquel Burillo}

2019 Topic 15: Coral

Some infusions magic for you in this post, but in true Raquel-style, she also has paints, inks, and many techniques for you to contemplate. This is a bright spread for her, and it seems many of these colours are outside her usual comfort zone, so what about you, will you turn your hand to a new shade of coral ?? you know you want to!!! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Raquel (scrapcosy) with you today, and I'd like to share with you this art journal spread inspired by my tea set collection and the coral colour. I used very simple techniques, not many steps, but the result is a vintage tea garden full of details achieved with minimal art supplies (in terms of colour), but lots of stamps... I couldn't help but use my entire tea stamp set collection!

As you may know, I love to add colour with infusions, so these will be the main supplies I used, but not the only ones. I wanted to add a touch of paint as well, so I couldn't resist to use one of the new colours recently released which perfectly matches with my colour palette. Can you find out which one it is? Let's see first the result and then I'll give you more details and a video with all the steps as well.

Since the topic was coral, it was only natural that I would explore the 24 colours of infusions and I would select the one which resembled more the living coral (Pantone colour of the year 2019). I may be wrong, but my selected colour was Orange County, a colour that to be honest, I had never used before, since among the shortlist were 2 of my all time favourites Rusty Car and Sunset Beach. But this time I decided to set those to one side. Terracotta was also very promising, I'll come back to that one in the future too. And to add some contrast I went and chose again a colour that it's not in my preferred list at all, but I know in Spain this colour is killing it! Is a Bit Jaded  a favourite of yours as well maybe?

And since I love metallics, I thought that WOW embossing powder in gold (Metallic Gold Rich Pale - superfine detail) would be a nice touch to add here and there. So this became my basic palette.

In addition to Infusions I also used these 2 paints: Chalk Fresco Acrylic Paint and the new Cayenne (available ONLY from approved PaperArtsy stockists - see here), which perfectly matches Orange County.

I selected all these stamps ESC13, ESC14, ESC15 and ESC16. I was particularly interested in all flowers, laces, cups and postage stamps from the collection, as you will see.

And I selected the stencil PS105 as well

Let's talk about the background first.

First layer is Chalk Fresco Acrylic Paint, added to cover the book pages, but
still leave a hint of the letters visible behind.

The next layer is sprinkles of Orange County Infusions spritzed with water. If you see, the edges of the page (porous surface, since I added less paint at the edges) have richer infusions colour and more spots than the rest of the page (which is less porous due to the paint layer).

Next, using the Tea cloud stamp from ESC16 "inked up" with leftovers of wet infusions from my craft-sheet, I stamped all over the page. In this case it's a very subtle result which can be only seen on the lower-left of the picture below. Depending on the amount of water and infusions you use (how wet the stamp is and how much colour there is on it) you'll get
different results.

Then, using a brush to get more dirty water from my craft-sheet I did some splashes. Please note, if there is no leftover of dirty gorgeous infused water on your craft-sheet at any of the 2 previous steps above, just create a puddle to splash with on purpose!

And once all Infusions layers are done, we go back to the paint and use Cayenne, which sits underneath the 3 clusters I created for the spread. I just used a stencil brush to apply it before I stuck anything on the page.

My next step was stamping all the flowers, lace, cups and postage stamps from my tea stamp sets below on Smoothy Card stock using VersaFine Clair Pine cone ink (waterproof ink). Then I water-coloured the images with Infusions Orange County, and a Bit Jaded. Once all was dry fussy cut the lot. Gosh! Cutting all that took me AGES!! I also stamped (same ink) and embossed with WOW Embossing Powder some elements in vellum and in regular smoothy.

At this point all those little pieces are nice and flat and clean. If you ask me, they are too flat and too clean for me, so now it's when I add my vintage touch with regular distress ink (Tea dye, another new for me) and some well needed volume using my fingers and nails and the back of some brushes.

Here you can (hopefully) see an example of the 3D added to the little flower in ESC14 (I bet many people missed that this flower exists on that set !! There are 11 individual elements in ESC14... yes, 11! And Leandra and her elves must hate me for including all those pieces that they have to cut when they produce their stamps... (sorry guys!!) I bet now many of you will go up the post and have a second look at the picture of the stamp set :P)

Once all is ready, it's time to play to get the pieces to their final spots, but of course, I don't have a design for the spread 100% clear in my mind, I just had a rough idea of having a sentiment on the left page (Keep Calm and drink tea) surrounded by some elements and then having the bottom right corner full of detail and climbing up and left the spread. I also wanted to preserve some "white space" areas. So you can see the original first arrangement and how, after many hours and few days later, it actually ended up.

After all those hours spent arranging and re-arranging I felt like a florist moving all the flowers and cups and butterflies until I found the perfect arrangement - at least from my point of view. And also had in mind that I didn't want to cut more pieces (enough scissors for a while!), so I had to almost do magic with just 3 stamped tea plants of ESC16 to get all those green leaves into my composition. I may have chopped one of those plants in 4 parts or more...

The little paper pieces were moving so much (they are slippery!) while arranging them that I built up each cluster using sellotape on the back of the elements, adding one thing after the other, to keep them in place. So basically formed three clusters. Here is the title one. I originally wanted to stamp on the page but somehow I thought it may look too boring so I decided to highlight it somehow. It kind of ended up in a cross shape with all little bits and pieces of lace and some leftover flowers stamps and a butterfly.

Here is the left corner cluster. I love the postage stamp cloud in ESC15. It's a fantastic piece to create your own ephemera. And all the tea words around it can be used for different purposes as you'll see in the different clusters (they've become a lace, see title above, a word below and part of a label, three pictures below)

And the huge cluster. Here is the top part of it where I left some butterflies flying around.

And the bottom part, maybe one of my favourite sections of the spread, with that label in vellum and all the tiny leaves arranged with the postage stamps and the laces.

I glued everything mainly with mod-podge and I gave both pages a layer of it on top which then allowed me to work with distress crayons for the first time... I used the Vintage Photo one. I also used the Vintage Photo distress ink, so between the 2 supplies I managed to get some shadowing around the elements in the page.

I also used some foam adhesive to create 3D effect in the butterflies as well as in the cups. Check the result in the picture below. By the way, when I designed this tea collection of stamps I had in mind that I wanted to create a pile of cups and I love I finally decided to give it a go and how this tower of cups turned out, with spoons coming out from different directions.

Just a final picture from me, showing more 3D goodness which I love.

And if you want to see more, here is the link to the video.

I really had fun creating this spread. It was a hard work with scissors and a harder work to decide the final arrangement but I'm very pleased with the result and I can't wait to do more fussy cutting in the future. I love how collaging all bits and pieces give you the flexibility to not commit to a final stamped image on the page and let you play freely with your design until you're 100% convinced. I specially loved to chop and re-purpose different parts of a stamped image (like the tea plant or some of the laces) and see what they become in the final design. There is no right or wrong on how you arrange the items in the collage, so as long as you enjoy the playfulness of it, it's worth to spend the time.

That was all for today, thanks so much for spending your time in this maybe-too-long post, but I've been out for a while with my baby and all, and I may have come back too energetic on my typing and my sharing of pictures... I hope I didn't get you bored too much, hehe. See you around! And until the next one!

My blog: https://scrapcosy.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/scrapcosy
Instagram: https://instagram.com/scrapcosy/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/raquel.burilloperez
Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Scrapcosy