Wednesday’s Letters

 

Mom can you help me this project? Ah yes, I have heard those words before. All my kids are so artistic, but at times they ask for my help.

 

 

Liz wanted to make something special for Wednesday’s room, so she bought some wooden letters in a really pretty font. She was undecided as to what to do with them, and so I suggested we do a little mixed media artwork. I had just purchased a beautiful tablet of papers by “Mariposa.”

 

 

When I carried in my light box from the garage and plugged it in, Liz was really wondering what this new contraption of mine was.

 

 

Here you can see what a great crafting tool a light box can be. It has a glass top with a bright light bulb underneath. This is great for tracing patterns, but in this case we were able to position the papers over each letter to maximize the beautiful details on the papers we were working with.

 

 

After the letters were traced on from the backside of the paper, each one was hand cut.

 

 

For the inside cuts on the letters I used my Fiskars utility blade, and my little cutting mat by Creative Memories.  

 

 

I then glued the papers to the wooden letters with Mod Podge and pressed them between layers of wax paper and heavy books.

 

 

With all the papers glued and dried it is time to really start to have fun. The studio is starting to look like a big mess, but that’s a good feeling. I pulled out all my bins of stamps, ink pads, glitter, glitter glue, stickers and let’s not forget the rhinestones.

 

 

I have some lovely clear stamps by INKADINKADO. They have nice swirly patterns in a variety of sizes. These will work nicely for the layering process.

 

 

I love to give some of my paper art an aged appearance, so I inked the edges of each letter with brown ink by Memories. I just love this ink, as it is permanent and will not run with all the gluing I will put on.

 

 

After stamping this letter it looked a little plain, so I used a metallic butterfly sticker on the upper right side.

 

 

Here I hand cut this butterfly out of a piece of coordinating paper from the tablet. I liked the way it had a raised effect and added more sparkle to this letter.

 

 

I did the same process with this bird.

 

 

To add additional texture I decided to use some flat back Rhinestones by Darice. These were glued in place with Gem-Tack adhesive.

 

 

You know, all I could think of as I did this project was that this is one very long name for such a sweet little girl. But here they are in all their glory. When I was finished with all the inking, stamping, glittering and embellishing, Each letter was coated with Mod Podge creating swirls with a sponge brush to prevent having brush strokes. They were then sprayed with many coats of clear acrylic spray. I took some very good close up photos, and have posted them on my Craftsy site. When in Craftsy, just click on the icon to the left, and try the hover option. You can really get in close and see all the detail.