I started with a book page from a song book that has been discarded as he is an avid music fan. I used my new stencils - large circles - to sponge a background all over it in blues. I dug through my scrap box and found the round heart elements which I cut out, sponged the edges with blue and glued to them to the book page. In my scrap box I also found some coffee themed vellum - he loves his coffee - so I ripped that into strips and glued that down. As you can see there was no real plan - I was just "going with it". I wanted to echo the gold in the vellum and circles I had originally stencilled on so I used a polka dot stencil, applied gold pigment ink and the applied gold embossing powder and heated it all over. I then used a polka dot embossing folder and embossed the whole background and then sponged on the same blue inks I had originally used to highlight the pattern randomly. I laid my background over a large piece of black for contrast and found that the black border was a bit two stark so I gold embossed polka dots on the edges of before I glued them together. I wanted to emphasize the collage aspect so I added washi tape to the bottom and top of the background securing the song sheet to the black. I added a line of blue washi tape which I wanted to use to as a base for my focal element. I like how well that worked. As the main focal element I die cut a bare tree (TH SX) out of dark gray and embossed it with a gear embossing folder (TH). I created a little embellishment using gold embroidery thread and two heart punchies and tied it to one of the tree branches and glued it to my layered background using white glue in a fine tip applicator. I fussy cut a laser printed greeting, watercoloured it to coordinate with the heart embellishment and glued it over the trunk of the tree. Really liked that!! It still needed a bit of something so I headed back to my scrap box and this die cut gold key caught my eye!! I auditioned it and found that it balanced the tree quite well by positioning it below the base line of washi tape. I mounted this large element to a large ivory card which I had sponged on the front edges with the same blue inks I had used to sponge the original background circles!!!!!!! Pretty happy with how it worked out!! Therese
