Refresh Your Craft & Soul Blog Hop

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to my leg of the Refresh Your Craft & Soul Blog Hop - hopefully you've arrived here from Jennifer Grace Creates, but if not, you should pop over there now and start from the beginning to grab all the details and make sure you don't miss any of the fun. If you visit all the blogs on the hop and then pop back to Jennifer's to let her know, you'll be in with a chance of a FABulous giveaway - more details at the bottom of this post :o)

This is just the start of a weekend-long free blog event, which promises to be full of fun, inspiration, challenges, prizes and giveaways AND it's open internationally too - WooHOOO!

Jennifer has loosely based the theme for this event on her word for the year, which is "Cleanse". Over the course of the weekend, we will be exploring a variety of ideas inspired by this word, including watery themes and trying new things. 

Trying something new always refreshes my craft and soul, even if it doesn't quite work out as I had expected. For this project, I decided to challenge myself to try out my new gelatos, and then use them alongside some other watery media to create a scrapbook page without using any patterned papers - totally out of my comfort zone as they say!  Here's a tiny peek at part of my finished layout ... 

... and here's the lovely shiny new gelato set my DH gave me for my birthday - as you can see, they're still pristine and my birthday was back in March! 

It's a great starter set, which includes 10 colours of gelatos, a tube of gesso, paintbrush, dropper, mister, stamp, stencil, 8 swatches of different materials, a book ring and instructions. 

Well I had a really good go at working through all the ideas in the booklet, I really did, but eventually decided it was time for some expert help - so as always I turned to YouTube and found this excellent tutorial  by Jill Foster demonstrating exactly the same kit! I started off copying Jill fairly slavishly until I started to get a feel for it and by the end I was beginning to add my own little twists. Here's my completed swatch book ...

I also coloured some chipboard embellies with a coat of gesso followed by different shades of Gelatos. Five minutes before I took this photo, my desk looked like this ...

... but one of the many good things about Gelatos is that they wash right off your hands, so no inky fingers this time! 

OK, now I had got my head around the Gelatos I was ready for the next stage of my challenge, so I gathered up a few more supplies ...

A couple of water pots, mixing palette, water brushes, needle-tip bottles, dropper bottles, acrylic paints, mists, and Gelatos of course (I decided to go for a blue/orange/white combo). Also essential but not in the photo were a mister bottle, some baby wipes and paper towels.

I got the needle-tip bottles and dropper bottles from Amazon - they're brilliant for creating squiggles and splashes and you can mix up and store a small amount of paint, ink or glue in them. You need to mix paint/glue with water to get the right consistency to flow through the needle-tip successfully but still hold its shape well. 

For this project, I mixed up some orange acrylic paint in a dropper bottle, put some thinned-down blue acrylic and PVA glue in needle-tip bottles and some ink from an old bunged-up mister in the other dropper. I also pulled out some Dylusions Ink Spray in Squeezed Orange and Cosmic Shimmer Mist in Vintage Blue, and some watercolour paper. 

First, using some of the techniques I'd learned from Jill Foster's tutorial, I had a go at some PL size cards, because I have an idea to start making PL-style layouts to go opposite more traditional scrap pages, so that I can scrap multiple photos of the same event or time in my life and include more memorabilia and journaling ...

The one on the left was just a simple wash of Gelato to create a colourful background, then when it was dry I added a scribble of blue paint from the needle-tip bottle. For the other two, I scribbled with PVA glue first, allowed it to dry and then washed over the top with Gelato. I will probably add words to these later. 

Next, I created a background on plain white cardstock, using all my watery media - paints, inks, mists and Gelatos ...

... and lots of dribbling and dropping, stencilling, scribbling, splashing and stamping! You can even stamp with Gelatos, by rubbing them onto the stamp, then misting with water to activate the pigments before stamping - it gives a lovely soft watery effect. 

Last but not least, I used my watery media to alter some embellies for my page ...

Some canvas shapes from the Papermania Bare Basics range and some plain white paper flowers were just begging for a makeover ...

The flowers were just spritzed with mists and the canvas shapes were coloured with Gelatos - I introduced a touch of green and pink and used a watery brush and my fingers to apply and blend the colours.

For the title I used Prima Canvas Alphas in white and applied colour picked up directly from the Gelato with a watery brush ...

Finally, it was just a matter of assembling the page, layering up some of my PL-size pieces to form an interesting photo matt, tucking in a scrap of doily, finishing with flowers and my canvas bunting. Here's how it turned out ... 

It didn't turn out at all as it had looked in my head, but I had a great time and learned a lot of new techniques which I will definitely be using again. 

So, how about you? What new thing would you like to try? How do you Refresh Your Craft & Soul? Oh and I nearly forgot my little prize ...

... some dropper bottles, a needle-tip bottle and a set of Aqua-Flo water brushes in three sizes. Just leave a comment if you'd like to win these - after the event I'll pick a winner with a random number generator and I'm happy to post anywhere in the world :o)

Thanks for hopping by - your next stop is Becky's Burblings. If you get lost, just hop back to Jennifer's for the full list.

If you comment on all the blogs in the hop, finishing at www.jennifergracecreates.com to let Jennifer know you've been all the way around, then you'll be in with a chance to win a refreshing prize pack featuring Glitz 77 and My Mind's Eye Izzy items, total worth over £25! All entries must be received by Monday the 9th of June at 10.59pm BST. 

See you there :o)