Scrap Happy Hanger

Each month here at Our Creative Corner we have a special guest designer.  This month, I have chosen a talented blogging artist Mo Stokes. Mo does lovely vintage style paper crafts and mixed media work and I knew she would do my leftovers challenge proud.  Mo is sharing an absolutely gorgeous shabby chic wall hanging that she has made out of scraps.

 
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Hi Everyone,

I am so excited and honoured to have been asked to be Guest Designer on Our Creative Corner for May which is being hosted by the very talented Linda Coughlin (aka the Funkie Junkie).

 Linda has chosen a great theme this month 'Love Those Leftovers!' The idea being to create something using all those left overs from previous projects we cant bear to part with. Now as some of you know already I do a few local craft classes and the amount of scraps of ribbons, paper, card I end up with in my stash is nothing short of huge, so this challenge was just perfect for me, I piled all my bits onto my desk and made some of them into this sweet little 3 panel wall hanger.

         It started off with a few 4" canvases that I had used whilst demoing on a class and

 a strip of mount board

I placed 3 canvases onto the mount board to see where they would fall, and 

covered the areas where any gaps might be with a couple of scraps of paper.

I chose a selection of papers that seemed to co-ordinate arranged them over the three canvases and stuck them down with a wet glue making sure there were no bubbles and the edges were stuck down well. I used a craft knife on the reverse side of the canvas to cut off any overhanging bits of paper I didn't want.

I decided to seal them with embossing powder one edge at a time and dabbed it into the versamark pad, made a row of embossing powder on a scrap piece of paper and then dabbed the edge into it. I carefully heat embossed the edge and repeated the procedure for all four edges of all three canvases. This took a little time and effort, but I think it gave it a nice finished look and also helped to seal the edges of the papers down

The next stage is where the fun really started. I started to pick out small scraps of lace trimmings, muslin, and ribbons and played around with them putting them along the joins where two papers met was the first obvious choice, then I tore a few paper sentiments and edged them with ink. The muslin is so beautiful when it is frayed back, and gives a lovely soft backing to the sentiment. I used the muslin this way on all three panels.

I wanted the rosette around the bird image and the Peace dove to pop out just a little bit more from the background, so I used pencils to go around them to pick out the detail a little more.

BEFORE



AFTER

I then used various die-cuts and left overs from previous projects, cut them up, and punched butterflies from them to use on the various panels.

I had a second print of the bird I had used on the third panel, so I cut this one out to decoupage over the top to give it some depth.

I glued the 3 panels in a row onto the strip of mount board I had prepared earlier and added to small screw eyes into the very end of the top one. I then threaded a ribbon through them for a hanger.

On this photo of the first panel you can see the dove in the background, the cut off piece of oval die cut, the muslin under the ripped sentiment and the punched butterfly glued only in the centre so his wings lift up. On the right hand side we have what was left of the heart die-cut we saw earlier, I just inked this a little with DI and two punched flowers with pearl bead centres. The blue in the very centre is just a little dab of blue stickles. The larger pink flower is a left over from another project ages ago which I made one or two too many. It is hand made from 2 torn circles of watercolour paper that had been spritzed with water and torn partway down from the outside edge to create 5 petals. The petals were pleated, dried carefully then stretched out again and inked. The centre is again just a small daisy punch finished with a pearl. 

 

 This photo shows the 2nd panel in more detail and here you can see the remainder of the oval die-cut used in panel 1. It has had the inside cut away so we get the pretty lace pattern, but we do not lose the roses on the paper behind. A larger piece of muslin can be seen at the back with a sentiment torn and inked in the same way as before and another die-cut over this for a nice layered effect. The metal butterfly has been dabbed with blue paint and a piece of inked ribbon left over from a previous project has been wrapped around his body with a couple of pearls. Again you will see that I have covered the join where the two papers meet, but this time with a tiny strip of contrasting rose paper (this was actually part of the strip you cut off from 12 x 12 papers) 

 

 This last close up shows you the bottom panel. The frayed muslin sits at the back of another cut off top strip from 12 x 12 papers and I loved the way the butterfly was just the right size to still be seen framed with the pearl heart buckle. Two of the roses have been die-cut with a spiral die and hand rolled and curled and the bottom left one is not hand made but matched in perfectly. The green stem of this one has been curled around a pokey tool, you may just be able to see the spiral pointing downwards towards the bottom lace. The largest scrap of paper on any of this project is just 4" x 3" and as you can see it is so easy to paper piece to get your background, it doesn't even have to be that big! Any stiff card ie grey board, mount board, corrugated cardboard can be used for the panels and back so it is so easy make one.

I do hope you have enjoyed seeing the step by step of this little wall hanger as much as I have enjoyed making it. Thank you for joining me today.

Hugs Mo x