Background Noise

Hello, and welcome... it's time for the monthly Artistic Outpost bloghop, and this month our theme is Backgrounds, Typography or Sentiments - lots of possibilities for words, words, words, so right up my alley, and I think I've pretty much covered all the bases!

There are great projects from the whole team, so you're welcome to just give this a quick look, so that you've time to go and have a look at what everyone else has been up to!  Here's the full hop list; click on any name to visit that crafter:

Gerrie Johnnic  Lisa Somerville  Suzanne Czosek  Tracy Evans

Linda Coughlin  Alison Bomber  Terry Horrall  Kate Yetter

I seem to be in an ATC mood at the moment, as you'll know if you saw my little book of inspiration earlier in the week and, entirely without intending to, that's where I ended up with this project: an ATC-sized accordion booklet, full of Artistic Outpost's fabulous sentiment and background stamps.

Here's the front cover...















...and here's what it opens up to...

...one way you get to see lots of sentiment pages...














...the other way you get to see lots of backgrounds!

There are some close-ups of some of the pages later on, so if you want to scroll past the "how-to" stuff to save time, feel free!







It all started with my first experiments with a Gelli plate - courtesy of my eclectic Paperie DT duties... I'm so grateful to have the chance to play as I've seen lots of amazing work out there using them.  But as I was trying stuff out, I realised that backgrounds were emerging which would be perfect to include for this Backgrounds theme.

Obviously I started with colours well within my comfort zone - lots of turquoises and blues.



One sheet - which was basically a mistake; not enough paint applied I suspect - gave me a delicious delicate mottled effect.














I stamped some of the delicious printblock alphabet from Secretary Pool, stamped in a combination of Snowflake and South Pacific Fresco paints... love it already, just on the stamp!











Next, I layered in the music manuscript and ledger page from the Ephemera Backgrounds set stamped in Memento Teal Zeal and Rich Cocoa.  The Gelli plate is a 6x6 one, so I would only be able to get two ATCs out of it, so I had to pick the best places to cut them from.








Another I left as it was, being pretty pleased with the flourish achieved by pressing an embossing folder onto the paint layer before "printing".










Another, where I'd used the Reverse Chicken Wire mask to create some texture - with limited success, but there you go... practice, I hope, will lead toward perfection in the long run - got a simple stamping of the ledger again to add interest.  That's what I used for the back cover in the end.

At this point, I was thinking of making a set of ATCs, with the sentiments embossed onto these backgrounds so that they would show up nice and clearly.

However, the more I looked at the backgrounds I'd created, as I was mounting them on chipboard, the less willing I was to cover them up!

So I decided to create the accordion book, giving separate pages for the sentiments - all from the Typography set - so that both they and the backgrounds would get to shine.

The sentiments are stamped in Coffee Archival on plain white paper, and then inked to tone in with the backgrounds... while the backgrounds got a little edging of Vintage Photo and Gathered Twigs to match right back.

Of course I also had all my leftover bits of background, so I gathered them up and started to create little flowers using the Tattered Flower Garland decorative strip die.

And inspired by the thrifty and beautiful work created by the lovely Chris at Pearshapedcrafting, I also decided to cut some flowers using the waste paper towel from all the Gelli plate mopping up I'd been doing.  She can work wonders with leftover scraps or a piece of inky or painty paper towel!

So that's layered into my little flowers too, and that meant there were enough to add one to each sentiment page as well as to create little arrangements on both the front and back covers.

I painted the bookplate on the front cover with Broken China and Picket Fence distress paints (they're so cool on metal!), and threaded the whole thing together using seam binding.

See - if I'd planned the accordion in advance, I could have stuck the seam binding behind the papers, but when you make it up as you go along, you have to put up with some compromises.  

And to be honest, I'm okay with having pretty white ribbon threaded through the project!






Thanks so much for stopping by today.  It's a source of continual amazement and delight to me that this crafty community is so dedicated and so generous.   Thank you for all the visits and support, and for the inspiration I get when I visit you.  Happy hopping - oh, and should you get lost en route, you can find all the details here!

Since they're also focussing on the words this month, I'd like to enter this in the Rogue Redhead Designs challenge Sentimental Focus.


Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling