TMC 10 Shadow Box

I can’t believe we are already in June, mostly because we have been having October weather here in the UK. Cold, wet and very windy! Anyhow over at The Mirror Crack’d we have a brand new challenge for you. We would like to see your take on ‘Shadow Box’. Do please pop over to the blog to see the awesome things the team have created.

We are sponsored by the Fabulous Woodware Craft Collection.

I fully intended to take lots of pics with this one, but life has just been too busy and to be honest I forgot until I was nearly finished.

Anyhow my shadow box is really small, it’s only 6” square in total and the aperture is just 4” square, so was actually difficult to stamp inside, and even more difficult to apply texture paste!

I started off with gesso and then painted with a couple of shades of dylusions. I did have  lovely underwater weed stencil but it was way too big to fit in the tiny centre so I created my own, several times, from a Magnolia Doohickey die and some thickish card. I made my own colours of texture paste by mixing distress stain and the paste. Getting the texture paste spread in such a small area was difficult, my tools were all too large and then I remembered all the old credit/debit cards I had kept in case they might be useful! They make excellent spreaders, particularly in small tight spaces.

I also added some along the bottom edge of the frame part of the box. When it was all dry I stamped inside and all around the edges with a combination of Designs by Ryn stamps and Sheena Douglass stamps. Again this was difficult in the tight space I had to just press down with my fingers as there was no space for a stamp block, or at least not one that had tack and peel to hold the stamps in place. Also I should have stamped prior to adding the paste, not after.

My turtles are from Susana Love’s Stamps. I coloured them both nice and bright to stand out from the otherwise sea blue/green of the rest of the project. I also glazed them to give the look of being under the water, and then stuck them in with lots of dimensional glue so that they were proud of the background weeds and stamping.

The shells were in a jar I had been saving for something special. They are a lovely blue cloudy porcelain.

This is my idea of Summer heaven, being anywhere near the ocean!

I’m entering this into:-

2 Creative Chicks – #27 Anything Goes
Altered Eclectics – June: Anything Goes
Berry71Bleu – June: Stamp It Up
Craft My Life – June/July: Anything Goes
Craft Stamper – June: Texture
Eclectic Ellapu – June: Pink – Anything Goes
Mixed Media Mojo – June: Summer (I didn’t use the twist)
Our Creative Corner – June: What Makes you Smile (the ocean)
Rhedd’s Creative Spirit – June: Anything Goes
Stamps and Stencils – June: Small Is Beautiful
The Artistic Stamper – June: Summer is on it’s way