New Year card with Sheena Douglass

Hello lovely crafters!

Are you as excited as me and ready for a long weekend of Sheena shows? As you may know the Teamies have been posting inspirational projects for the last month and today is my turn. The idea is to show you how you can mix up the collections and how they work together.

I decided to create a New Year card. This would be perfect for friends or family you know who may not be religious but to whom you would like to send your very best wishes for the year to come.
And the thing is we aren't even using Christmas stamps to do this.. I admit it, I hold my hands up I am totally in love with the music stamps, guilty as charged lol... but you can get so many amazing effects with them. These are the stamp collections I have combined to create this card.

And so it begins... are you ready?... you may want to make a cuppa...lol

So I cut up a kitchen sponge and pulled out bits of it randomly to make it more natural and took a 7" square piece of card. I would suggest wearing gloves if you don't want to look like a Smurf...

I used Landscape Aquatints, the two blues and the green and then the purple (58) from the Beautiful Grunge collection and sponged them on to the background. Remember to leave some white patches so you get full colour and where the colours overlap it blends. 

Then you end up with something like this. I again used a technique also used on  my other post 'Techniques used for Sheena,' where you add silver Aquatints too.  A little tip for this is to add some water to your glass matt and then a drop of the metallic to it. This waters it down so that you get a hint of sparkle rather than full on gold or silver. Also the extra effect of this, is that the water you have soaked up also pulls some of the colour out of the background, so you get a lovely pattern with lighter areas too. I only did this around the edge as I wanted it to seem like smoke drifting away in the air. 

A close up so you can see the effect better...

I then took the music stamps and began to randomly stamp the rays and stars. They were stamped with Memento silver and gold ink. This gives you a base to work with. 

And then came the foils!! You saw it coming didn't you? lol And the fab thing is I managed to get hold of some coloured foils for half price on Hobby craft!! Yay! I love it when a plan comes together. :) You can see how I was planning to layer it up on the background...

For this I drew out an 8" square on a piece of card so I had a guide line to tear along. Always tear towards you and then you get the rough edge on the top.

The Hands of Time stamp then came into play and I stamped it round the edge. Distress Inks, Tea Dye and Walnut Stain were used to age it. 

The clocks were stamped several times as I was going to decoupage them.

I began to add colour with AquaBlend pencils

I decoupaged the torn edges and clock faces and added gold foil highlights to the centre of them.

I then mounted the time flies background on to an 8" card (which I had covered with black card as it was cream) and layered the fireworks on top of it. I wanted this card to represent the moment when we great the new year and all the fireworks explode.  And I thought the Time flies fit with this really well too as, like most of us, I don't know where most of the year has gone already! I had to photograph this at an angle so you could see the way the foil catches the light. I've also just realized... you know how some people trim their houses up for Christmas and they look like they can be seen from space?..This is probably the equivalent in a card...lol... No one will miss this if you send it to them! I added the same foil colours randomly around the edge to finish off this panel.  

The sentiment is taken from Sheena's Christmas Notes stamp set. I thought the freehand style of the font was perfect for this as it reminded me of how you can write words in the sky with a sparkler. :)

I hope you have enjoying seeing this project as much as I did creating it.  Why not have a try? It's great fun and whoever you give it too will be amazed and wonder how you made it. :)  And you can say oh I can't possibly give away my crafty secrets! ;) 

My fellow teamie, the lovely Penny Butler, will be blogging on Monday 29th August with her inspirational project.. you can check out her blog here... :)

http://ladypenelopesfabcraftyblogspot.blogspot.co.uk/

Adele

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