{Spotlight Project} Monika Gets Motivational Up-cycling Old Coasters

Hello STAMPlorations Friends! Happy New Year to you all! Should you need a little bit of motivational input at the start of the new year, my up-cycled coasters wallhanging will hopefully provide you with this.

The original plan was to make a nice card, but my mind was absolutely blank, no ideas whatsoever. Instead I picked up a few faded coasters I've been meaning to re-purpose for a while and created this little wallhanging using some of the Typografia Motivate stamps.



Let me take you through my process of how it came about.

First I cut three pieces of white card to cover my coasters and attached them using acrylic glue.

Next I rounded off the corners and sanded the edges.

Having decided to go for a rainbow coloured look, I picked my three inks (Daffodil Delight, Melon Mambo and Bermuda Bay) based on the yellow, magenta and cyan colours of inkjet printer cartridges. Bermuda Bay is a bit more green than cyan, but still works well.

I started off by colouring one of the coasters and the neighbouring edges of the other two with Daffodil Delight.

The top coaster got brushed with Melon Mambo overlapping with the yellow ...

... and the bottom coaster with Bermuda Bay. The lighter areas are due to glue smudges and didn't take on the ink, more about this later.

To finish off my rainbow, I brushed a bit of Bermuda Bay across the upper pink edge ...

... and some Melon Mambo across the bottom edge of my Bermuda Bay coloured coaster.

This is how my rainbow looked like.

Some water spritzing started to blend in the glue smudges.

A bit of stamping using a flower from Bloom Doodles added more interest to the background.

With the dye ink not clinging to the glue smudges I used some matching alcohol markers to further blend them in by adding colour and drawing in the missing bits of the stamped images.

I picked up the Typografia Beautiful Destinations, The Future Belongs and Chance To Change stamps and heat embossed them on my coasters.

Edging the coaster with Aged Gold Frantage powder embossing added more definition and would help to blend in the flowers and leaves I wanted to use.

I then embossed, watercoloured and fussy cut a few flowers, leaves and butterflies. Some of the flowers were embossed using the Aged Gold Frantage powder and others were embossed with Pirate Gold embossing powder. The leaves and butterflies were embossed with Frantage powder only.

At this point I got out some beads, ribbon and twine and roughly laid out my flowers and leaves where I wanted them to go on the finished project.

I decided that I needed a few more leaves and a butterfly.

Before adding the flowers, I needed to attach the ribbon for the hanging loop and to connect my pieces. I added some strong double sided tape to the reverse and attached twine using the glass beads as spacers and embellishments.

Pink organza ribbon for extra stability and squares of pretty paper finished off the reverse.

At this point, I arranged my flowers, leaves and butterflies again and took some photos before shaping and securing them all in place. The photos I took helped me to memorise where each of my elements were intended to go.

I finished off with matching glimmer dots.

I rather like how the Frantage powder embossing on my stamped images mainly picked up black with some flecks of gold whilst around the edges of the coasters it picked up a lot more gold.

This concludes today's tutorial. Hope my little wallhanging inspired you to follow your dreams this year.

Have a lovely day!
hugs
Monika xxx


Here is what I used from the STAMPlorations Store:
Beautiful Destinations, The Future Belongs, Chance To Change
  

Bloom Doodles, Fluttery (currently on offer in the 12 Days Of Christmas event here until January 5)