MONOCHROME

Spring has finally sprung - don't you think?  The leaves are starting to sprout on the trees and there are lots of lovely daffodils everywhere it sure makes a girl feel much brighter.

You might want to brew up as this has ended up being a long post for me !!

We have had a fantastic response again from you guys for our Flower challenge, so many fantastic entries - wow and some lucky person is going to win  so come on get your thinking caps on and join in this month!

It's the first of the month again - how quickly they come around and it has been a busy old month with lots going on culminating in a fabulous day out at the Port Sunlight Happy Stampers show . the Clarity stand was as busy as every and oh I just had to buy all sorts lot - MORE stencils - I am as addicted to these as I am to the stamps lol I was a very good girl though and I have saved some pennies because our Barbara will be on the telly next week so there will be more new stamps out and my guess says there will be some more word chains...oh I need a house just for my crafty collection lol - I have to try and be really organised as i haven't got a dedicated craft room that I can shut the door on and hide my stuff!

On the subject of organisation I do use the dining room table to craft on (we don't use it every day now there is only me and grumpy at home) but tables unlike desks do not come with drawers so my stuff is all in a little tool bag with handles but its not big enough for some stuff and my brushes would get spoilt so when I went to a show in February the lovely MDF man was there and I bought this "thing"  I think it might supposed to be for remote controls but I thought it would be ace for some of my stuff so I have decided to combine the decoration with this month's them of monochrome.

Here is the result but I have done a pictorial tutorial of how it all came about.

I started by giving it a couple of coats of black gesso inside and out  and left it to dry thoroughly

I cut sheets of paper to fit all four sides - 

I forgot to take a pick but I then stamped all of them with the crackle stamp and slate grey before adding the trellis stencil and swooshing through with more slate - all very subtle like - look at the state of this stencil  I tried to clean off all the acrylic paint from my gelli sessions but got fed up and I thought - that'll do.

Now I wanted to create some decoration  so I used this really lovely corner stamp to form a border top and bottom

 and the diamonds from the letterbox frame set to create another pattern around the middle 

It took me ages  - it would have been far quicker just to use patterned paper  but I think this is much nicer and here it is full of stuff - my brushes are missing cause they have been having a wash lol because I bought another set on Saturday so now I have eight and I can keep one brush for each colour family - yay

Oh and my hand made by stamp just lives on the front  - do you like the flutterby - it's a pencil it was a pressie from a friend lol.

Crackle stamp

Trellis stencil 

Velvet corner

diamond shapes