Carol Inspires!

Hello and welcome to Magpieheaven! Thank you followers old and new for stopping by! It is really lovely to have you around. Although I've been desperate to squeeze in more crafting time lately, I've made sure to pop over to Paper Artsy where Carol, one of my favourite designers since I started following the PA blog back in April, has been creating some wonderful projects. I loved her pencil-case transformed into an elegant jewel box and then - her piece de resistance - her wonderful pencil box! Click HERE and you will see what a talented artist she is. As anyone who follows me will know our kitchen is being transformed so slowly that it frequently comes to a full stop! We're back in one of those phases now as we wait for the cupboard doors to be made - well, I hope that's what we're waiting for! I took down my old spice rack to make way for a new cupboard and decided to transform it, hoping to work the same magic as Carol did on her objects. Here it is all yucky and faded blue like my old kitchen! We need a bigger spice rack so it's going to be used to store my Treasure Gold, I think.

I started by sanding it down and then giving it a coat of Snowflake Fresco all over as a kind of primer so I could get a nice coverage and build up layers on top of a good foundation. In places I slapped on a good layer of Little Black Dress, as I wanted to Crackle parts of my rack. I used mainly Sage and Mermaid on top when the crackle was well dried, with the odd hint of Hey Pesto and Chocolate Pudding in the edges and corners and this is the effect I got. 

I then Grunge Pasted the sides through a Harlequin stencil to add some dimension as Carol had done on her pencil case.

I painted over these, using the dry brush technique with just a touch of Baltic Blue and built up layers of Mermaid and Sage again. I will show the result of this later. But now for the fun! Carol awakened in me what can only be described as a love affair with Shrink Plastic! Sorry Helen - I know you don't like it - but I'm just crazy about playing with the stuff and experimenting! I decided to add SP medallions using die-cuts of hearts and  flowers and I really enjoyed playing around shaping the flower petals with a cocktail stick and tweezers while the SP was still pliable under the heat gun. I created multi-layered flowers by pressing the layers into each other as I heated and shrank them and they did stick! I'm sure this amount of fun shouldn't be legal! I'm still amazed I didn't burn myself!

I used alcohol ink and Treasure Gold to decorate my flowers, but I believe you can use Fresco paint on SP before heating - remember it darkens so go for pale shades.

Now it was time to bring all the elements together. As Carol said on her post about card design, it is important that everything works well as a whole and does not look like a jumble of different bits! Here is what I ended up with! I used pearl beads for accent and stamped with a Paper Artsy mini swirl. I also edged the rack with Treasure Gold in White Fire and Green Amber.

On the sides I stamped some script in Hey Pesto and Chocolate pudding and accented some of the Grunge Paste diamonds in White Fire. It is difficult to see the effect of the Treasure Gold in the photos, but - as ever - click on any image you might want to see in more detail! The images on my SP medallions are from Paper Artsy 'Ink and the Dog' plates - Buttons and Petals.

Well, thank you so much for staying with me and looking at all these pictures - hope it hasn't been too picture-heavy, but I just wanted to show the process a little bit. I was so excited at the transformation! Let's hope I'll some day be delighted with my new kitchen too! Thanks also to Carol who has been so very inspirational this week, showing the many original and beautiful effects possible with stamps and paint and Paper Artsy!