A Valentine Canvas - Frilly and Funky Guest Designer

Hello Crafty Friends!  I'm thrilled to share my post today with the Frilly and Funky blog as guest designer for the current challenge.  I earned the honor for the layered shabby chic Valentine card that I entered into the 'Anything Goes' challenge last month.  You can see my winning entry HERE.

For their current challenge, 'Be My Valen-Twine, I was asked to create a card or other project with a Valentine theme and using twine somewhere on my project.


I began with a 10 x 10 canvas, which I inverted to create a shadowbox, and then I applied some mixed media techniques to the "frame" portion.

Below you can see how the canvas looked early on in the process.  I began by painting the frame with gesso, covering the canvas, the staples and the inside wood portion.  I then tore a sheet of music note paper and applied it to the frame with matte Mod Podge completely covering the canvas, the staples, and the wood.  When that was dry, I applied texture paste using a doily stencil positioned in each corner.  I added distress inks in pink and in red (spritzed with water) to my craft mat and dragged some of the texture paste through the wet ink to color it before applying it to my stencil.  I then inked the edges with red ink, and stamped over the frame in black with a script stamp.

After taking a photo, which somehow helps me to get a better perspective, I decided that the red around the edges was too harsh, and that the texture on the frame wasn't interesting enough,  so I added washi tape in music note pattern over some of the red edges and on the frame itself I added a heart patterned washi tape and also a black and white polka dot and a red chevron pattern.  I further softened it, and toned down the red outline with gesso applied by rubbing it on with my finger over the edges and over the washi tape.  It looked much better and I got down to the fun part of embellishing.  (see the product list at the bottom of the post.)

I still needed to add twine to the project to meet the requirements of the challenge, so I decided to simply roll up some twine to use as embellishments inside the shadowbox.  I shaped them by wrapping the twine around a cone shaped object.

Thanks so much to the amazingly talented team over at Frilly and Funkie for choosing me as their guest designer , and I hope you have enjoyed your visit to my blog today.

Supplies:

10 x 10 canvas

White Gesso by Artist's Loft

8 1/2 x 11 Music Note Paper by Recollections

Texture Paste by Liquitex

Doily Die by Prima Finnabair

Dye Ink by Memento in Red Magic

Script Stamp by Hero Arts

Black Archival Ink by Ranger

Steampunk Valentine images by HopePhotoArt on Etsy

Flourish by Sizzix

Paper Covering the Flourish by Gecko Galz 

Dressform Die by Tim Holtz

Word Banner on Dressform by Gecko Galz

Paper Covering Dressform by My Artistic Adventures on Etsy

Metal Arrow by Tim Holtz Idea-ology
Glass bottles by Tim Holtz Idea-ology
Glass Microbeads by Martha Stewart
Heart Bingo Card found on Pinterest
Love Digi Stamp found on Pinterest