Meet Guest Designer Michelle Wallace.

Meet Michelle.....

Hello all... ..A brief to intro myself........ I am a SAHM to four kidlets aged 17, 11, 7 and 6. I often say that we live in a zoo because of all our animals we have gathered in the last two years (Staffy cross called Nero, tortoise shell cat called Toffee, Fish called Michael, and two guinea pigs called Butterscotch and Drogon). I have been crafting on some sort since a kid. I have mainly focused on scrap booking as my passion for the last 12 years. I have been lucky to share my passion with others and teach here in Adelaide, however have been very quiet on the scrap booking front for the last two years due to changes in my family setup. But in saying that I have had the best year with my work as I have done my best work. My children and I have been through a lot in the past two years and I have used my scrap booking to escape and stay focused on the positives. I craft whenever I can in between currently studying myself and juggling kids sports and calisthenics. I am looking forward to creating with Crafty Crusaders :-)

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I am most excited to be able to share with you my first post EVER on the Crafty Crusaders blog. 

I am looking forward to being able to share with you all what I have able to create using some of the goodies sent to my to play with. 

Now just to explain a little... one of my daughters is turning eight this month. 

For her birthday party she has decided that we are having an Alice In Wonderland Tea Party type of party with a bit of our own twist. 

Now... the twist is that for us there is A LOT of Alice in Wonderland things on the Internet to be able to create for a party. 

However we wanted it a bit more girlie in the twist so we have decided to create our own little bits and pieces for the table centre piece. 

With that in mind we started to chase up teapots to use for the centre piece of the table. As much as we wanted to use mismatch teapots, I wanted them to be personalised a little. 

I have already started the table centre pieces off with creating these goodies..

I managed to find one more teapot that I loved the style of that I just had to alter to finish off the table centre piece.

So with that is mind I would like to show you how I took this  patterned china teapot and made it our own. 

I started off the process by adhering two different napkins (just the single ply of the napkin that is patterned) directly onto the teapot using a glue wash and a #4 Shader Princeton Camel Hair Brush. I then adhered a paper doily that I had cut into quarters where I desired. Then I added a few more pieces of napkin to blend in the doily to the base. For the inner rim of the tea pot, top of the lid and the inner spout I used some Pebeo Studio Acrylic Paint #26 Mars Black to highlight them. I did use two coats to give a nice matt finish. This went onto the shiny surface of the teapot really well too.  

Now.. I found the napkins a little bit bright so using a #4 Shader Princeton Camel Hair Brush I painted the whole teapot with a white wash of  Pebeo Studio Acrylic #41 Vivid White. 

I then let the whole teapot dry before sealing it twice.

Then came the fun bit.  I gathered up paper flowers that I wanted to play around with on this teapot. I had some plain pink paper flowers that just didn't quite match the teapot colours. With that in mind I altered the flowers using a foam brush and some Pebeo Studio Acrylic #41 Vivid White Paint then a smidge of Pebeo Studio Acrylic #50 Magenta just on the edges . It really reminded me of the Queen from Alice in Wonderland when I was painting these.... painting the roses red and all that. 

You can see the large queen of hearts playing card I have altered with white napkin here that I have used as the base of the embellishment cluster. I applied a white wash with Pebeo Studio Acrylic #41 Vivid White over the whole playing card before embellishing over it.

Here you can see I have used some Pebeo Studio Acrylic Paint #26 Mars Black and a dry foam brush to highlight the rim of the teapot and the spout just a little. I have also added subtle highlights to the textured napkin over the whole tea pot too.

I can also tell you too that I have played around with a few of the other paper roses on this teapot too with some of my Mepxy Markers. Once the aqua roses and pink magnolias were adhered to the tea pot I wasn't really happy with the colour match. The aqua looked too green to match the blue of the napkins and the pink magnolia were originally very very pale pink.

I did  the same thing with my Mepxy Brush Markers to finish off this large rose. It was also very pale pink. Just a touch here and there of the markers to the edges and I finally got the effect I was looking for. 

Have had so much fun playing around with creating this teapot and thinking outside the box just a little. Cannot wait to be able to set the table up for the party now. Have one very excited little girl who LOVES her new teapots for her party.

Lastly I wanted to show you the quick card I created using a digital stamp from my stash I have printed onto some Canson Illustration  250 Paper and coloured in using the Mepxy Brush Markers. 

Layered a couple of digital stamps onto a Project Life Graph card for the base age card. then adhered this on some of the matching Teresa Collins paper range I used on the teapots. Added some paper flowers, a chipboard greeting and matching sheer blue ribbon. 

To finish the card off I have printed the little girl digital stamp from my stash onto some Canson Illustration Paper and coloured it very basically with the Mexpy Brush Markers to keep it simple. 

She was then adhered using 3D foam to give a little dimension.

Super quick but fitting with the Alice In Wonderland look.

Well off to play with my Mepxy Brush Markers and some more digital stamps I have printed off.

Till next time. 

Get Creative !!

Michelle W xxx