A thing of shreds and patches...

Hello all and welcome back... for the third time today perhaps!  I'm a mad March hare today at Words and Pictures with treble trouble - a trio of posts all due today.

The first of the trio is my inspiration offering for the Artistic Stamper March challenge.  But there's also my latest project for Calico Crafts to be seen.  I'd really love it if you had time to check them out.  Not forgetting yesterday's exciting announcement of course...

But right now, I'm here to share what I've created for the brand new challenge at Our Creative Corner.

The marvellous Linda Coughlin, a.k.a. the Funkie Junkie, is our host for March, and her invitation to us is "Let's Get Scrappy"... 

She'd like us to use scraps and leftovers from previous projects - those pieces of paper, scraps of ribbon and embellishments made and never used, that none of us can quite bear to throw away.  

Well, now it's time for them to take their turn in the limelight.

I used some of the many, many, many inky painty scraps of paper which accumulate every time I'm crafting, and the left over bits of patterned papers, as well as some of the extra glass pebble embellishments created all in one go and now waiting around to take their turn.

Here are just a few of the bits I gathered from the craft desk and the floor round about before starting.

I also grabbed a couple of larger leftover scraps from the box which, rather than being sorted, came from the old house intact - full of scraps and half-finished tags.













I'm now very glad that it did, since the scrap at the top left of that first photo came out of it, and ended up taking centre stage as the word panels on this piece.

I glued down torn strips of some of these papers onto a piece of mountboard.




I gesso'd over the top of them, and then splodged down various colours of Distress Stain over the whole thing.





A couple of spritzes of water and some heatgun action later...

I'd kept the gesso quite thick around the edges, stippling it on with a hard bristle brush, so that you get lovely textures showing through the translucent inks.













But now I was after some more full-on texture... Wendy Vecchi's translucent embossing paste applied through a stencil.  

Here, it's already had some more Distress Stains applied over the top.










By the end it had been spritzed with all sorts, with some Shimmerz paints in the mix too, I think.










Time for some stamping - all Unity stamps in this particular creation.  

There's a bit of SheArt Print Texture layered into the background in Aquamarine.










The text echoes the book page strips beneath...

And being free to play with whatever I wanted in the stash, I reached for the fabulous Donna Downey Delicate Wildflowers.











Perhaps that other meadow flower panel in the scraps crept into my subconscious, or maybe I'm just obsessed with meadow grasses.













I think this is the smaller size, from the Insightful Meadows plate.

They're mainly in Olive but there are also a couple of Aquamarine shadows.















And then we have our three main word panels. 

I was so thrilled to find that Donna Downey's "Inspire" Words fitted perfectly across my inky panel (no idea what's on there any longer - I suspect Distress Stains over gesso or ground).





















And so three out of the four words made it on (you also get "believe" in the set)...
















... with the 'handwriting' scrawling on from one end...














... and trailing off at the other...













And then, of course, there are the glass pebbles... 













I made them for a particular project, the Garden of Dreams (and you can see how by visiting the garden)...









... but I thought I might as well make lots while I was at it, so they should keep me going for a while!














So, I was pretty happy with where I'd got to so far, but it just felt like it needed something more.














The frame was just another leftover - one of many, many I altered for the Handmade Wedding in 2012. 

With some more of that leftover music manuscript whitewashed in the background, it seemed like the right setting for my scrappy make.

Do hop over to Our Creative Corner for lots more inspiration, and come and share your scraps and leftovers with us this month - and don't forget my other mad 1st March posts here and here if you're interested!

A wand'ring minstrel, I,
A thing of shreds and patches,
Of ballad songs and snatches,
And dreamy lullaby...
From The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan





I pasted on the scraps, used the gesso as a texture paste and I couldn't resist adding some translucent embossing paste too, so I'd like to enter this in the Paste challenge at Simon Says Stamp's Monday Challenge.
I'm slightly uncertain as to whether it qualifies for the Monochromatic challenge at the Stampotique Designers Challenge, but I'm going to give it a go!

And now I'll leave you in peace for a few days!!