Scrap Matrix Blog: "Hold dear always" .. with Alz

Morning peeps!

I'm back to share another Tic Tac Toe Monochromatic page with you. This time I went with brown ..

Hold dear always

.. and the vertical strip on the left .. Brads (buttons or flair), Paint and Chippie Shape.

This layout posed some challenges. First of all, brown. What was I thinking? Lol! Its not that I don't like brown. I mean crikey, I have a brown dog, and brown furniture. In fact my whole house is varying shades of brown now that I think about it. Except for some accent walls. But I digress (oops).

I created my own background on watercolour paper with various inks, stencils, stamps and 'stuff'. First, I used the same technique for sticking down dictionary paper as I used in my last project (see here). Once it was completely dry, I sprayed my page with water and started adding 13Arts Ayeeda Paint Rainbow Colour in Brown. Because I was working on a few pages at the same time, I had the luxury of allowing my page to dry naturally which meant I could allow each layer of the brown ink to dry before repeating the process, ie, spraying my page with water and adding some more of the 13Arts Rainbow Colour. By doing this, I was able to achieve, albeit not a lot, but some, depth of colour in my brown.

Of course I couldn't stop there, so I grabbed my TCW Mums Stencil and Paper Artsy Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic Paint in Nougat and sponged the paint through the stencil onto my background. Once it was dry I felt it really needed some definition so messily outlined each of my Mums' petals, three times. I did it whilst I was 'watching' TV so it really didn't take that long. Next, I added some black texture paste through another TCW stencil. Finally, as you'll see on my close up photos below, I used various Aall & Create Stamps and a Jet Black Ranger Archival Ink to add that final touch to my background.

As with my last share I decided against using layers behind my photo. With hindsight, a few weeks after creating my layout, I think maybe some plain white and/or cream layers would have worked well. But at the time, well yeah. Moving on lol! It was time for embellishing, one of my favourite parts of scrapping.

I sprayed various pieces of Chipboard (Circle Words Adore Italic #2 and Doily Border) with 13Arts Ayeeda Chalk Mist in Dark Brown and once dry (which took a while as chipboard is sooooo absorbent), inked the edges lightly with the Jet Black Ranger Archival Ink. Inking the edges gave the chipboard just a bit of definition helping them to stand out from the page.

I removed the 'pearl coloured' centres from some Prima flowers and replaced them with Prima Memory Hardware Glass Pearls in a dark colour. I also painted some Metal Flowers with black paint and then lightly scratched back some of the dried paint to reveal the metal underneath. In my embellishment clusters I also included some of my favourite flowers (Petaloo Botanica Minis) .. they're the perfect size for tucking in here and there, you can do so much with them, including leaving them plain, and a pack seems to last me an awful long time.

Because of the Tic Tac Toe line I had chosen, I had to include a Brad, Button or Flair. I went with an Um Wow Studio Flair. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I love these flairs! They're just that little bit larger than your average flair, and they're just that bit flatter. I love them!!

Some of my stamping was a wee bit messy so to partially cover and distract from the particularly bad spots, I stamped some birds with Aall & Create Stamp Set #6, cut them out, coloured them with a brown pencil from the Prima Watercolour Pencils in Earth Tones, and adhered them to my page with foam tape.

I also scattered around a few black rhinestones I cut from a strip of Molossi Crystal Lines. If, like me, you love bling, you seriously have to get some of these Molossi Crystal Lines! A packet will last you forever. No joke. Yes, you can use them as a strip, but one packet comes with five strips, and you can cut them up into smaller strips or individually as I generally do. Aaaand at the time I wrote this post, there are eight different colours in stock, including teal and pink and lime green .. sigh!

Finally, I needed to add a title and some journaling. You'll probably notice I tend not to journal a lot on my pages. I also don't usually add large titles. I like to rely on my product to provide my title and/or journaling. For example, I could have titled this page "Adore" as that's the word being repeated on my chipboard circle. But I have a lot of pages titled "Adore". So I added some of the words from Tim Holtz Idea-ology Chit Chat stickers - Verbiage, and that was that. My second Tic Tac Toe Monochromatic layout was finished. Yay!

Don't forget you have until midnight on the 14th of May to add your entry to the appropriate album on the Scrap Matrix Shares Facebook page. Please also share with us which Scrap Matrix products you've used. Finally, because this is yet another long post, and you might need a reminder, here's the Tic Tac Toe Monochromatic board for you to have another look see at ..