Featured Member!

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.  I'm so behind on blogging and uploading pics.  I should be sharing Halloween but I have to toot my own horn first!  Last week I received a message from Design Team Member,
Debbi Tehrani at Color Combos Galore asking if I'd like to be this weeks Featured Member.  Oh wow, for me this is big.  It's one thing to enter challenge after challenge for my own personal satisfaction.  It's also very flattering and uplifting to be chosen for Gallery Fave twice.  But to be ASKED to design a layout for specific combo..was very ego boosting, very flattering and VERY VERY NICE.  It's like, VALIDATION!
I said, YES.   So Debbie emailed me the color combo....can you guess what the colors were?

 Yellow?  There's YELLOW... that's okay, I ran with this challenge.  Part of the challenge was to focus on DISTRESSING and well if you know me... I absolutely LOVE to distress things.  It's therapy, it's messy, it's just happiness for me.  Wanna see what I made?

My inspiration came from several items of the photo...1st the quilt.  Love it.. the blocks of fabrics, the stitching that quilting embodies... I used QuickCut diamond die for my "quilt pieces", distressing each and everyone.  Around the entire page, I faux stitched.  After drawing in my stitches, I went back over with my water pen and caused the stitches to run and smear a bit.  If there was an edge to distress, I either inked with my FAVORITE Distress Inks by Tim Holtz aka "God".

My 2nd inspiration were the shutters.  I love shutters, so with that I pulled out my favorite scoring tool (you know the one from that woman, "it's a good thing") and scored a two inch wide stripe of paper every quarter inch.  Then I folded a box pleat.  It's easy, really, you just have to pay attention to the direction of the folds.  Do not multi-task during this, you will goof it up.  Once my folds were pressed and established, I sanded all edges and adhered.

My flowers presented another opportunity to distress!  Using my favorite layered flower die (psst. guess who?  Yep, TH!) I cut all my flowers.  Before assembling, I coated some petals with crackle medium, others I crumbled and inked, some were sanded and inked.  I also used a new medium, a product called, Modeling Film by Wendy Veah.  It's an acrylic you can stamp on, use alcohol inks or copic markers on, then you HEAT it with an embossing tool to cause it to warp and bed.  It's cool, cause if you don't like the shape, reheat it and try again, and again, and again until you are happy with it!  It's COOL! (And I'll be the first to admit, I totally stole this technique from Tammy Hall Tutterow, check out her blog!)
Throw in some stickles, dimensional pearls, glimmer mists, a touch of ribbon, a touch of grunge board and embossing powders...then it's done.
Thank you CCG for inviting me to play with the Design Team this week.  It's been fun and a joy.