Midsummer Madness Frame swap

This swap took its inspiration from an altered frame project in Craft Stamper magazine.  My swappee is Caroline, and her theme was " A season", (not all girly and yucky though) It took me a long time to get started as I couldn't find a suitable frame to alter, so I had to decide between using the reverse of a small canvas or a box.

I eventually found my stock of canvases and boxes, amazingly they were right under my nose all the time!  and after weighing up the pros and cons decided to go for the box, which is very thick and sturdy, with a canvas effect finish.  Plus it was white which made it easier to paint and alter.

I cut out the tree trunk shapes on the lid and inner section, then used acrylics to colour the whole box.  I painted and sprayed the inside of the box to give it a misty/frosty look and did the same with a spider web I had printed on acetate.  lots of leaves were die cut in autumn colours and sprayed in glimmer mists, and a quotation was stamped and heat embossed.  The bulrushes were also heat embossed using distress powders.  The title was painted to get it the right colour and stamped with one of the leaf stamps which I also used on the outside of the box.  I tried to place everything in the box to give it a layered effect, as if you are looking out betwee trees nto a misty landscape.

I stamped a Stampotique Wolfie king and coloured him with pencils.

Domino Book swap

This took its inspiration from an article in Craft Stamper, and would have probably been a whole lot easier if I had managed to get hold of dominoes of a normal size, i.e. 1" x 2" instead of the 1.5 cm x 2.5 cm that was all I could find.  my swappee for this was Lexi again, and this time her theme was "There's no place like home"

I had some lovely house stamps which I thought would be perfect for this, but they had so be stamped on paper, scanned in and reduced in size to fit the book.  I set up a row of resized houses and trees, and printed them off twice (The second time in reverse) , before colouring them in, cutting them out and glueing them back to back. 

Two of the stamps were used on shrink plastic and shrunk before being coloured in and covered in clear embossing powder.  these were added to the dominoes used for the book covers, which had previously been painted and heat embossed before the edges were glued and dipped in micro beads.

Four tiny alphabet beads spelling home were glued to the base of the dominoes as feet.

The open book

 

The front cover

 

The back cover

 

The feet - as you can see, I had trouble tying the book tightly shut as it turned out that what I thought was a ribbon when I fished it out of my ribbon bag that evening was a piece of some kind of faux leather trim. 

 

 

Butterfly Chunky

Here is the third chunky I made for a swap over on UK Scrappers, for a lady called Lexi whose theme was butterflies.  I happened to be on holiday in Ireland when the the swap details were sent out, but I was able to log on briefly to get the details.  This proved to be lucky because on our last day in Dublin I found a lovely little bead and crystal shop, where I bought the mesh butterfly shape I used on the front of the chunky, and the shared bead caps that I used for the feet.

The butterfly shape was coated in several shades of metallic embossing powder, I added wire antenna and used stickles on the body.  The paper I used had butterflies on, but I stamped and heat embossed some silver butterlies over the top too.  on the sides I added wooden butterflies that had been inked and painted with acrylics, with stickles used as trails.

The ATC front:

 

 

The right hand side:

 

 

The back (The quote is printed on Safmat):

 

 

The left hand side: