Earn Your Stripes

Good grief (Charlie Brown), it's busy here at Words and Pictures this week!  I'm just squeezing in my DT post for the new challenge at Fun With ATCs between PaperArtsy projects.  I hope you've enjoyed Projects One and Two so far - number Three will appear later today.

But first of all it's time to invite you to come and play with our new Fun With ATCs challenge theme: Stripes (I told you it was busy!).  

Remember, Artist Trading Card size projects only, please - that's 2.5 x 3.5 inches.  And here's my stripy offering for you...

I originally set off in a completely different direction with this.  Here's the quick proof...






Stripey kraft glassine, run through a stripey embossing folder...






Stripey Tim Holtz stencil, overlaid with Artistic Outpost stripey ticking stamp from the Kudzu Kafe set...







But I was thinking too hard, and then I got completely stuck, so I abandoned all that for another day and another project.








Instead, I grabbed some tissue tape and just let what wanted to happen happen.




It's just such lovely stuff - easy to work with, so pretty, and it does most of the work for you.  I just laid down some strips of it onto a piece of 2.5 x 3.5 cardstock, and there you have them: stripes!

You know what?  I was pretty tempted to just leave it there!

But no, I reached for the Fresco Snowflake, and whitewashed it.  I usually just put a blob of paint on the craft mat, give it a quick spritz of water and then mix that direct on the paintbrush and onto the project.

Then I remembered I had some lovely Kaisercraft lace, quite narrow, which would work nicely as textural and dimensional stripes, so I grabbed a few pieces of that.

You get five different styles within one pack - pretty handy.

And then, although there are already plenty of words going on within the tissue tape, I thought we should really have some more prominent ones.

So I found myself a nice wide Tim Holtz sentiment - not too tall either - that could be another "stripe" within my ATC.  













I distressed the edges with the Tim Holtz paper distresser, and that was really pretty much that.  

Simple, stripey, and it really makes me happy!

I hope you'll have time to pop over to Fun With ATCs and see the lovely inspiration from my fabulous team-mates, and - even better - I hope you'll have time to play along with our Stripes challenge this fortnight.








I'll be back at 7pm today with my third and final PaperArtsy post for September.  It would be wonderful to see you then.

Oh... and I nearly forgot: since it's Tuesday, I'm over at Artistic Outpost today too.  I think I need a lie-down!

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Marcus Aurelius

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
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