Crafty Cardmakers & More Challenge 138 - Make your own background

Pamellia is hosting today at Crafty Cardmakers & More.

She would like to see something that you have created using a background you made yourself. So NO designer papers please.

I like making backgrounds - sometimes I get more pleasure out of doing that than making the topper, to be honest.

I'm not a neat crafter - I like the messy play aspect of it sometimes, and I have been looking at the brusho backgrounds for some time now.  

Recently, I discovered a craft shop that specialised in all the arty inks and paints I love (check out That's Crafty, in Harold Wood) and treated myself (among other things) to a starter pack of the brusho paints.

They look like any other powdered paint and come in small drums.  However, if you shake a tiny piece of the powder onto a piece of water colour card that has had a plain water wash put over it, each speck EXPLODES into colour spectacularly!

This was a smallish card (A6) and I made it for a friend who recently lost her mum.  She was dreading this birthday, the first without her mum, so I didn't want to go over the top with her card.  

I used half a sheet of A4 white card folded in half to make my base card.  I cut a piece of water colour card from Crafters Companion to make my background layer.   First I did my plain water wash, and then using a small brush picked up some of the colour powder from each drum (turquoise, yellow, lemon,  orange and emerald green) and flicked it randomly on the wet card.  Where bits had dried a bit, I spritzed it and reactivated the powder.  When the wash had dried, I stamped onto it an inkylicious flower silhouette stamp inked up with black archival ink.  When it was dry  I spritzed the whole thing with some docrafts spritzing ink (gold).

When the card was dry again, I layered it onto a piece of black card  to make a thin edge that would make the colours pop.  I wrapped some black spotty ribbon around the bottom of the mat and layer, and then stuck the whole thing onto the base card.  

The last thing I did was to stick a bow made using the same ribbon and a stamped sentiment edged with distress inks onto my ribbon strip using my hot glue gun.