heart

For this forthnight’s Q&L challenge (which apparently is the penultimate, I had to look that one up, thx I learned a new English word) I choose the word heart.

A couple of weeks ago I bought Julie Fei Balzer’s carve, stamp and play book because I admit I am a stampaddict and am intrigued by making my own.

She is also having a challenge called #carvedecember, you can find everything about this here.

The first project in the book is carving a heart.

As it goes with addictions I couldn’t stop at making just the one and I made 5, actually I only made 4 but the negative makes also a great stamp.

For my spread I started by free cutting heartshapes out of bookpages. 

I added some textures with texture paste through a dot stencil, there was a happy accident as I don’t clean of my stencils, the dots became blue. I then stamped the different heart stamps (I like the stitched one the most) across the middle of the page.

I wanted to keep it simple, because I was liking the left over white space (normally I fill everything up with color but not now), but it was missing something and that something was a ribbon.

I stamped my favorite heart stamp along the ribbon and created a focal collage underneath it with a doily, a vintage picture, some feathers and a heart gem.

The ribbon I didn’t glue but sew on ( can you believe I sew it, I am absolutely rubbish at sewing but I like the look and well I figured I can only get better if I practice, right?)

Here’s a close up of the collage

Last but not least I wrote the quote A heart that gives, gathers from Tao Te Ching on tissue paper. I used acrylic paints in handy bottles with a fine tip (from Ikea).

The paint did take forever to dry however(overnight).

I also will be linking to Inky Dinkly Doodles sunday sentiments.