It's all about the words

Good Morning all - Where did April go then, it certainly went by in a flash but not so fast that we didn't have lots of fantastic entries on the Claritystamp challenge blog - Oh so many for the monochrome theme a very difficult choice to pick my favourite 5 - glad the winner is picked at random by computer!

So why not join us this month - you too could be the winner of a lovely voucher to spend on the Claritystamp webiste  - then you would have a difficult choice to pick what you would like from all the fantastic stuff on there!!

So the challenge for May is all about words.  The original theme was going to be song titles and in my head I knew what I was going to do ...but then we changed it to words and I was stumped.

After much debate with myself this is what I eventually came up with

I started with a gelli print from my stash of prints from my big plate.

I know that the plate is rectangular and I like square pieces to work with but sometimes the 6 x 6 doesn't seem big enough.  So not long after I got my gelli plate I came up with an idea for making it square.  I drew around one side of my gelli and around the corners onto a piece of plastic I cut from one of the plastic wallet  document holder jobbies.  I then made it the right width to leave a square on the gelli plate.  

I put it on the side of the plate before I add my paint and stuff and simply whip it off before I pull the print 

Anyway back to the challenge  as I said I started with one of those prints you have in your stash but I wanted one that had lots of white still left on.  I then added lettuce adirondak using my stencil brushes 

You can't really see it on the photo - you won't believe how many photos I took at various times of the day and in various places and you still can't really see the green! David Bailey I definitely am not lol.

So anyway trust me its mostly brown with some green on!

I got my inspiration from a chart I saw from made up of words - it was one of those stupid Facebook things and it picked up the words I used most on my comments so that's what I will do - I thought to myself!  But felt it would need a saying on top - took me ages to think of something - it came to me in the middle of the night!

I stamped some of the words from the word chains on to some copy paper and then cut around them to make masks - I sprayed them with stick n spray to make them re positionable and started laying them out on my background until it was full. I laid some horizontal and some vertical.  When I was happy with it I removed one stamped the same word in its place then went onto the next one.  I used fern green and sepia archival inkpads to do this - I obviously did all the green first then all the brown ones.

I used my letterbox set  to stamp out all the little boxes in the sepia archival  on a piece of white card.  I used my brushes to colour the card with old paper I stamped the letters again in sepia then cut them all out leaving a small border.  I added some of the lettuce with a blending tool and then mounted the tiles onto brown mats.  I stuck them on top with foam pads to lift it up.  I matted and layered onto brown and cream - job done.

I hope you decide to have a go this month as I can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with .