believe ... an inchie Christmas

I just love, love, love the fortnightly challenge at Ready Steady Stamp and the current challenge recipe is given below:

I am also entering this into three other challenges.

At Theme Thursday the theme is to use 'script or writing'.

One Stop Craft Challenge has a challenge to 'use diecuts'.

Finally, the challenge at A Spoon Full of Sugar is 'Christmas'.

For this creation, I was very much inspired by the Inchie Collage technique kindly shared at Gingersnaps Creations. So thank you! This is my take.

I dug out some of my Christmas stamps ~ Tim Holtz and Paperartsy. After stamping them out and inking up the paper, this is what I ended up with (click on photo for a better view).

TIP: After stamping the images, let them dry before adding the strips of ink colour. I smudged the first strip I did, so quickly heat set the cardstock before carrying on. Apologies for the upside down paper, I didn't even notice until I went to view my photos!

The next step was to cut the card into inchies. I don't possess a square punch so I decided to cut my inchies using the square cut on my cricut machine. This meant that I couldn't hand pick my inchies, but it was quite fun to leave it to the randomness of the cut!

I cut the whole sheet and then chose the inchies I wanted to use. For each inchie I either crackle glazed them or added glossy accents.

When dry I mounted them on to chipboard. I initially tried to do this by cutting the chipboard with my cricut using my extra deep cutting blade. However, it kept cutting the square too short, ie it wasn't an inch all round. Haven't a clue why so if anyone can tell me what I did wrong I would be grateful! Nothing ever seems to come out right when I use the extra deep cutting blade. So I mounted my inchies onto chipboard and cut them out by hand. I then inked the edges with a silver paint dabber. I didn't use all of the ones I made up as I completely changed my mind about how my finished piece would look ... as you do.

The next part of the recipe required me to use masks on a background. I really liked the idea of having snowflakes in the background.

As I didn't have a snowflake mask, I decided to make my own. I cut three different snowflakes from my Speaking of Winter cricut cartridge and placed them randomly on  a sheet of pink Bazzill. I then used blending foam to blend the white ink over the masks.

I repeated this several times, moving the masks around until it ended up like this:

Having done this, I was then able to arrange my inchies on the square to suit.

I cut a piece of corrugated card and applied some white gesso. I took two diecut brackets which originally were white and glittered but the perfect size. I applied some silver paint dabber to them, so now they have a nice texture to them. The 'believe' panel in the middle was a section of a Tim Holtz stamp.

My final piece looks like this:

                   

Thank you for looking.

keeley

having a {me} day