Friends of Unity October Blog Hop

Welcome to our Friends of Unity October blog hop! This one held a very different kind of challenge…

Well, I really had fun with this challenge! Finally had the opportunity to take my mixed media skills to another level. I’ve been wanting to develop skills in this area as I’m just in awe and fascinated watching the wonderful YouTubers that handle this technique with such ease and create such beautiful creations. I would love to complete my own art journal completely filled with page after page of inspiration to look back upon. To go from this…

to an inspirational page, like below, with special meaning to oneself is so rewarding! Art therapy is a real thing, and I totally enjoy every minute getting away from the world as I wander around in the creative process. Also, will serve to track my progress as I continue to develop my skills.

Before I continue on to this month’s efforts, I’d like to congratulate 

Crafty Deb

on being the winner of my post from last month’s hop! Please message me your address and I’ll send along a little package with some Unity goodness! As usual, I, as well as others on the hop, will be doing another giveaway this month as well, so be sure to leave a comment on each post for a chance at some freebies!

So, I started attacking this challenge by opening my large art journal I picked up at a class a few years ago. I pulled out some interesting ephemera, I think from Bo Bunny, that I picked up at a discount store years ago. (I’ve collected a variety of odds and ends that I could use on this technique.) I also pulled out Unity stamps, coordinating paper scraps, acrylic paints and went to town. It took me over 2 days with a lot of drying in between layers. The thing about art journaling is that the audience for the piece is oneself. There’s no one else that needs to be satisfied with the result. Did I make a ton of mistakes… heck yeah. Would I change any of the decisions I made… of course! Does it make anyone else happy… probably not. But it was so fun! I took amateur video of my efforts, and sliced and diced it into 2 parts. Used several stamp sets and stencils for this one: Unity’s Stories to Tell, Just Magic, Open Your Eyes, Emerge and Border of Bells, and a Studio Light and an Art Anthology stencil. Hope you enjoy watching them! (There were a few steps I missed filming, but I think you can get the gist of what I did.)

For my second project, I wanted to make a tag using freebies from my Unity membership. This time I used 2 stamp kits, Love Anchors and The Ocean is Calling and paper scraps again… in some cases crumpled for texture). I also used a couple stencils on this one as well.As you will be able to tell from my video, I am all about texture! Enjoy watching this one!

Finally, my last 2 efforts were devoted to making Christmas tags using some of the tiny stamps from Unity’s Advent calendar kit. The first set, Ho Ho Ho, were developed with distress oxides, Primary Elements shiny powders and specialty embossing powder. Because the backs were dirty I attached paper that I used to paper piece the hat. I added some die cut snowflakes and a snowflake button to each.

The second set was developed using 2 tags. I adhered large music sheet Washi tape strips over the top tag. I then stamped the images and papers pieced them together (with the exception of the largest tag which I just added pen colors to). Fussy cut them out and added little die cuts and preprinted sentiments. Had fun creating these Christmas tags… I need to do this every year!

 Thanks for stopping by… hope you received a little inspiration from my creations! Remember to leave a comment! Now onto my fellow bloggers’ beautiful ideas…

You may have come here from:

Eileen’s blog

Next up is:

Dawn’s blog

Or you can start at the beginning with:

Crystal’s blog