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Sunday 13 January 2013

No Time To Choose

Hello there, Cedric here, fresh out of the bears' sick bed, to show you my crafternoon creations. Horace bought the bears a new journal for our calendar challenge, and I decided to utilise it for important events throughout the year.

The first major news of the year is that our dear Cub, Florence, is moving away at short notice, due to her husbear being offered a lovely new job in a new city. This has resulted in them trying to find somewhere to live in rather a rush.

As we moved to the bear bungalow only a couple of years ago, we can remember the stress of trying to find suitable accommodation, although not at such short notice.Thinking of their dilemma inspired me to journal it, to relieve the stress the bears were feeling for them.




I decided to copy a background I'd seen in one of our Craft Stamper magazines.




I used the dylusions colours suggested in the CS project.




Spritzing them directly onto my craft mat




then folding my book in two, and placing the page directly onto the sprayed area.




I repeated the process for the opposite page, as I wanted to create a double page spread.




After dabbing my pages with our snazzy snowman kitchen roll, I then flicked the pages randomly with water, and dabbed again with the kitchen roll.




I dried them with the heat gun. My furry foot seemed to get extra hot whilst carrying out this step. I have no idea why???




Voila, one simple background with which to create a page.




You can add further effects to your background, but first I wanted to check that my chosen images would fit the page.




Wilbear drew these fabulous houses for me, utilising an old book, they look really good drawn over the text. Isn't he clever?




Once I had my images in place. I decided my background needed more work, so I set to adding effects to it. First, I rubbed distress inks and stains around the rim of an old hot chocolate tub and pressed this onto my page.




I then used our fab Dylusions stencil, which, incidentally, fit my A4 page almost perfectly. I sprayed water through the circles, left for a few minutes, then raised off the stencil, and dabbed with kitchen roll, to remove some of the ink.




Next, I spritzed through the squares border with Dylusions




Then lifted off the stencil,




And turned it over, pressing the negative onto the opposite page. This creates two different effects with the same stencil. Clever eh? (I learnt this trick from watching a Dyan Reavely tutorial.)




I then assembled my page, after colouring Wilbear's groovy houses with Spectrum Noir pens and distress stains. I added journalling with various alphabet stamps.




Florence said she loved the page. I added a date so we can all remember this event, and hopefully laugh about the stress we all felt,once the move is over. Journalling this event really relieved the pressure of the day for me, try it if you have an event that is causing you stress. It really helps. Alternatively, eat a chocolate bar, that helps too!!




With love from the bears.

6 comments:

  1. That is a good way to deal with stress. I might try journalling this cold to make it go away!

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  2. Loving the bright colours. Horace's houses are wonderful. Hope your foot cooled down ok? Ali x

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  3. What a crafty little bear, lovely bright page, I'm not showing this to my DD other wise I suspect I'll be washing spray ink out of her bears forever.
    C xx

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  4. More stunning pages - the book text houses are simply fabulous (well done Wilbear) and the background you created with all those stencil techniques is wonderful! Good luck with all the moving... I really empathise.
    Alison x

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  5. Just Simply wonderful. The houses look great - thanks for the tips on creating backgrounds too. You have certainly found your niche with the art journalling :)

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  6. Love the mix of colours and your houses. Was very impressed to see that you had journalled about me :) xx

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