Items Used
Plain white bag with handle
Pipecleaners 2 Red, 2 Green
Red, green & yellow Crayon
Moon Glow sprays - Bucket o' blood and Treasure Island Aqua
The Challenge for the Stampsmith group is as follows.
Using a Stampsmith stamp create a Thanksgiving card and bag.
Make your own background paper. Use warm browns, reds, yellows, golds and shades of green.
Make for an elderly person you know and the card should attach to the front of the bag.
I should have known by now that any challenges in the months of October/November will most likely be Halloween & Thanksgiving!. Not being from America these are not things we celebrate nor do I know much about. Halloween isn't so bad as I know it involves scary things...lol....but Thanksgiving? I felt there was a little space for international interpretation.
So how to make it harder for myself.....make it for my grandfather, who at the ripe old age of 95 is the oldest person I know...lol.!!!!
The stamp I chose was from the Darling boys sheet. Stamped with Versafine Ink and then painted with watercolours and a very, very fine brush.
(right)The before colouring and after.
The background paper
Using 2 different stamps of leaves, I used gold, red and yellow embossing powder. Some of the leaves are two toned sprinkling the embossing powder in sections. I then used red, green and yellow crayon to colour the leaves and create a resist.
It was very hard for me not to use glitter or feminine touches but that's all part of the challenge. I wanted the background paper to have the sparkle but old world look and still be masculine.
I sprayed the Moonglow Shadow mists in two shades all over. It looked like this when wet (right) but dries to a lovely walnut brown shade with rivers of darker areas where the walnut ink colour has pooled. The whole area has a subtle sparkle of mica in aqua & red.
Assembling the bag
The background paper I used to decorate was a piece of white sticky back paper. This made it easier to attach the backgound paper on the paper bag(recycled). Using two colours of pipe cleaners, I wrapped around the handles to add colour.
To be able to attach the card as required, I used 2 small pieces of red paper glued only on the straight sides to form two pockets. I cut lots of leaves from the quickutz dies and placed them around the top edge using the larger ones on the bottom. These were only stuck down at the top so they bottom edge would overlap the card and hold it more securely in place.
The Card
The background paper strip was used with three stripes of paper in yellow & greens. The gold and red stripes are gift wrapping ribbon that I stuck down using double sided tape.
The leaves are layered on a darker colour to form a shadow look.
I used my computer to make the wording as I didn't really have anything that I though was Thanksgiving related or that sort of fit the theme as well as fitting into something I could give. It's Remembrance Day on Thursday 11th for us here in Australia and my grandfather served in the army and lost many friends and family to war. I would like to think I've captured the Thanksgiving theme in a way that my grandfather and I would be able to relate to.
You can see from the picture at the top how the card slips into the corner pieces and under the leaves for a complete package.
Thanks for looking.
Tip : Your computer is often a forgotten resource for wording. Many programs come with text and text editing. Don't forget, you can have a lot of fun using the text editing in the photo editing programs which most people have now. I usually make the text, then cut and paste several times and change the size of each so when I print it out at least one is the right size I need.
