Popping in midweek, whatever next?

Hi folks, it is unusual for me these days to find the time inbetween my Forgotten Friday posts to come and say hello. However, I have been feeling that my poor blog has been woefully neglected lately. My OH and I have just got back from an overnight trip at a lovely hotel called Dunston Hall on the outskirts of Norwich, in Norfolk. My two BILs bought us the trip for our Silver Wedding Anniversary back in November. It was a lovely gift, as it gave us a brief bit of time out, and the surroundings were lovely.

The hotel seemed very imposing when we arrived, but I loved the tall twisted chimneys.

The frosty mornings were just so cold though, I would have liked to have seen more of the grounds, but it was just too chilly to walk around. This week, I have been working on shrink plastic with my card class, at their request. I made a card with them based on a lovely project made by Linda Elbourne for the Craft Barn She used Tim Holtz fragments, Paper Artsy stamps, and shrink plastic. I started by getting the class to make a masterboard with Distress Inks, choosing Old Paper, Victorian Velvet, and Crushed Olive for myself. They chose completely different colours. I kept the application fairly light, as I wanted to add lots of layers afterwards. Now as my shoulder is still quite painful, my blending is still a bit off, so I misted my card with water when I had finished, which kind of smoothes the blending out a bit. I then used a chicken wire mask and went over the Old Paper sections again, using Old Paper DI over the mask. At this point, I chopped my card in half. On one piece of card, I started to add lots of small Paper Artsy stamps, using the DI colours that I had used on my background, to build up some layers. I then stamped the large flower head in Black Archival Ink three times. I stamped the word 'Fly' and the 'birds in the grass' stamp onto the plainer piece of card, again using archival ink, and heat set this. I stuck the fragment pieces over the top of these stamped images with Glossy Accents, trimmed around them, and smoothed the edges with a nail file. I then cut two Nestability butterflies from clear shrink plastic, after sanding it a bit, to give it a key. I coloured it lightly with pencils, and then stamped it with parts of a scroll stamp, using Stazon ink. I shrunk these, bending them slightly with my asbestos fingers, while they were still warm (very hot!) Then I edged these with a gold Krylon pen. Once the card was assembled, I stuck the butterflies to the card with Glossy Accents.

I loved Linda's original project, and I hope that she won't mind me casing it for the much simpler project that my card class really enjoyed putting together.

Thanks for stopping by today, and I'll be back on Friday with my Forgotten Friday project, xx