Lack of Inspiration

I've been a bit lacking in inspiration of late and needed a bit of a prompt to kick start my thinking. After working on the themes set for my May swaps (see last post) I decided to do a bit of web browsing and uncovered all sorts of crafty sites with challenges.

Now that left me in a quandry because now I had too many prompts and couldn't decide what to start with so I incorporated a whole lot! Here is the result of a bank holiday weekend and an amalgam of themes from:

The Craft Barn Challenge this week is Holidays
The Stampotique Designers Challenge last week was Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
The Artist Trading Post May Challenge is to use found natural objects
and A Sprinkle of Imagination Challenge is anything goes



The holiday theme speaks for itself and is inspired by childhood seaside holidays. I have used Distress Inks to make a watery back ground for the cover and cut a label (from a camembert box) using the Tim Holtz Sizzix tag and bookplates die. Both products are available from the Craft Barn.

There are a lot of old things included, not least the board book itself which cost 10p at a school fair. The window of the niche is cut from the packaging of some new crafty stash. The shells and sandpaper have been borrowed from the garage. The first from a bucketful collected by my son several years ago and the second from the tool cupboard. I have also incorporated blue paint, card and bits borrowed from some pot pourri.

I have made a "photograph" of Stampotique's Eric by masking some glossy card stock to create the white edges and then stamping with Archival ink. The scenery is a second generation impression to make it fade into the background. He is coloured in with Distress inks used as watercolour. The inks and the  Crafty Individuals ticket stamps used as the background are available from the Artist Trading Post.

I peeled the board book to remove the shiny printed surface and, after cutting out a niche, painted the whole thing with a coat of matte gel to seal it followed by two coats of white gesso to get a bit of texture like old heaviliy painted wood. The shells and glass pieces are glued in place using Glossy Accents which forms the effect of a shallow layer of water at the bottom of the niche. All these media are available from A Sprinkle of Imagination.

I'm off now to browse for some more inspiration.