Friday 16 May 2014

Mary Elizabeth is chasing winter away!

It's another big share from one our of March Top 3 winners today and it's GORGEOUS! A mixture of mixed media and altered art, this inspiring piece is a wonderful take on Donna's theme this month...



Mary Elizabeth
I am blessed to have grown up in a creative family.  They created with words, music, photography, wood-work, clothing, doll-making, plants & gardens, food, machinery, etc.  Our home was an amazing place.  Personally, I loved to draw and preserve memories.  I seriously considered going to art school, but I fell in love with teaching and now I teach mathematics at university.  Life is funny sometimes, isn’t it?  Anyway, I continued to play around with scrapbooking as the years went by; however, it’s only been in the last year that I seriously got back in touch with my creative roots.  I’ve never been so happy.  I am excited to have found and be inspired by this wonderfully talented online community.  Many thanks to everyone at Country View Challenges for being a part of that inspiration :)  — Mary Elizabeth

It is finally feeling like Spring in the mountains of North Carolina and I am celebrating the new “Natures Glories” challenge theme by creating my own lovely bouquet of  Daffodils.  At the time I began experimenting with my floral creations, we were still having snow and I was dreadfully tired of the cold.  I used Tim Holtz’s Composer Tissue Wrap to create the almost translucent petals.  I mixed some of Tim’s Distress Ink with Matte Multi Medium and painted that on the tissue wrap to give it a little more durability when I die cut the petals from Tim’s Tatter Flower Garland.  The daffodil centers are just a half circle that rolled up to form a cone with some small pearls on the inside.  I could not help myself, I grunged my flowers up a bit.  I made the stems out of plastic drinking straws that were covered with more tissue wrap and tissue tape.  

I wanted to display my flowers in a special vase, so I tried a Wendy Vecchi technique that I learned in Creative Chemistry 102.  I covered a plain glass vase and painted it with Matte Glue and Seal and Rock Candy Crackle Paint.  The faux cracked glass look turned out fabulous.  I then decided I wanted the glass to have a little color.  After trying several ways to color the glass and/or the crackled finish, I finally ended up lightly coloring the crackled finish with a Salty Ocean Distress Marker. 

This project kept me going on those snowy gray days.  I hope others will enjoy it as well.



Thank you Mary Elizabeth for this original and creative piece!

Wow! How diverse can we be? Lots and lots of lovely ptojects, all so very different and we love the fact that we can share so many genres with you!

We're now half way through the month and we hope you're cracking on with your projects and getting them ready to enter. Don't forget, there is a fab £20 shop voucher for our winner, chosen at random, so EVERY ENTRY HAS A CHANCE OF WINNING!

We'll have yet another fabulous guest highlight for you in a few days.

Chris and the team. xxx