Tando Creative Sponsor Spotlight - Time to Bloom

Hello everyone, Alison here, and delighted to be offering up our third Sponsor Spotlight for April.  I'm sharing a project created with some of the wonderful products available from our generous sponsor this month, Tando Creative.  This is photo-heavy, so grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy the ride!

From their huge range of chipboard shapes I used...

the large one of the Three Clocks in One

the Flowers With Stems Grab Bag

and two of the Clock Hands

... and this is what it all added up to!  A 12 x 12 canvas...

with lots of texture in the background, and lots of crackle...

And dimension and words aplenty.

I started by coating the largest of the clocks with Croco Crackling Colour by Viva Decor.

My medium is actually white, so once it was all dry and crackled I applied Distress Stains in lots of colours from nature... starting with earthy browns at the bottom, working up through the leafy, grassy greens, to blue skies at the top.

I spritzed with water as I went to allow the colours to mix and blend on the surface.

I made sure I had the clock hands approximately in position (I generally go with ten to three - "is there honey still for tea?") so that I could see where the colours needed to go, and gave them the same treatment.

They're fastened together with one of the Prima industrial effect brads.

I'd originally been thinking of creating some sort of hanging mobile, but when push came to shove, I realised it would be tricky to get the hands in the right place and so on.  So instead, I decided to mount the clock on a 12 x 12 canvas.  (That should tell you how big the largest clock is!) You can see an early draft here... the untreated clock and flowers, with a plan to "hang" the clock on a "tree"!

In the end, rather than the tree bark paper, I used a piece of 7 Dots Studio paper from their 9th Wave collection as my background.  It already looked pretty good just as it was...

... but I decided to augment it with some actual texture.  I added pieces of lace and cheesecloth, and glued them down with multi-medium.

And I applied some texture paste through the Tim Holtz doily stencil in various places.

Once all that was dry, I applied gesso fairly roughly in places...

... and then set to with some spritzing and spraying and inking.

I used partly Distress Stains which I'd put into misters...

... and various other sprays including Dylusions, Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists, and Ayeeda sprays from 13Arts.

I sprayed and dabbed and knocked back and sprayed again until I was happy that my added texture looked as though it was an organic part of the paper.

I glued the whole thing down to the canvas and gave the edges a good roughing up for texture and dimension.

Next it was time for the flowers...

Having created such a busy background, I decided the flowers themselves needed to be relatively simple and neutral.

I stamped the lovely SheArt Print Texture (by Christy Tomlinson, Unity stamps) in Coffee Archival...

... and did a little light inking around the edges, and then arranged the stems around the clock face, trying to make sure they balanced nicely.

The words arose out of the two Tando products in use - clocks and flowers... time to bloom, then.

They're stamped with my Hero Arts Playful Flowers letters...

... and inked and mounted on padded tape over the textured background.

The final step was to add some musical tissue tape around the edges of the canvas.  Never neglect the edges!  And I used the Distress Stains here too to tint the tape slightly to blend in with the main surface of the canvas.

So that's my Tando Creative Canvas for you.  I hope you like it (if you made it this far!).

If you missed the other Sponsor Spotlights here at Our Creative Corner this month, do check out Claudia's project, and Laura's creation - they're both fantastic.

And if you'd like to be in the draw to win the Tando prize package this month, there are just a few more days before the April 28th deadline to play in my With A Song In Your Heart challenge.  Don't forget you need to include the song title or some lyrics on your actual creation, and check out the rest of the rules by clicking on the challenge link.  Hope to see you there!  Thanks so much for stopping by today.