Steampunk Notebook

Good morning.

I hope you had a good weekend, I had a great time yesterday, I spent the day locked away with my craft stash and lots of new goodies.

A new Challenge starts today at Crafty Boots Challenges, but this is not some ordinary challenge, this one is in celebration of Crafty Boots third birthday.  I remember the morning of that first challenge so vividly.  I sat nervously hunched over my laptop at 10am waiting to 'press' the publish button.  At that time I had no idea that you could schedule posts, in fact, I was hardly able to load the photos of my project.  I had been crafting for over 35 years yet I knew nothing about blogs, I am sure Stephanie-Emma had her fingers crossed behind her back when she convinced me I could do this - and to be honest with you, I have not really improved over the past three years.

To celebrate this anniversary Crafty Boots Challenges are revisiting the theme of that first Challenge and the theme for the next two weeks is 'Anything Goes'.  As part of the celebrations, Crafty Boots Challenges are offer guest design team spots to the winner and two runners up of this Challenge.

This Challenge was a great opportunity for me to open up all of those new packages and to start playing.  I wanted to make something a bit special for this challenge and I knew just the thing.  I recently bought two of the Sizzix layered Bigz dies, the ones with the texture fades embossing folders ... the bee and the dragonfly.  I have been itching to try them ever since I saw an amazing piece created by my good friend Lizette, AKA Mrs Beez.  Her fabulous steampunk project blew me away.

When the dies arrived I had been surprized by how large they are and, in order to use both on the same project I had to find a large enough surface, a A4 notebook seemed ideal.

I was so lucky, a local supermarket has been selling off some end of line notebooks at a very reduced price, perfect.  The notebooks already had thick covers but the plastic surface of the notebook was not suitable for painting on.  So, I covered it with a sheet of thick hammered card and painted that with bronze metallic acrylic paint.   To give the impression of rivets, I stuck some card candy around the edge and painted them with the bronze paint.  I stamped the card with an IndigoBlu Script stamp and their Tree-mendous stamp.

I then painted more sheets of card with different metallic acrylic paints, some of these I used to cut cogs and others I embossed.  I cut the insects out of soft drink cans.  I was not sure whether I would be able to emboss the cans but the actually took the embossing very well.

I used two cog dies sets, these were a Robert Addams set and a X Cut set.  I also used some very small metal watch parts to add to the cogs and to decorate the bee.  I decorated the dragonfly with flat backed gems.  Finally, I added black ink smudges.

I have had a lot of other ideas for how to use these dies and I hope to be back later in the week to show you how they turned out.

As always, the rest of the Crafty Boots Design Team have been working hard to inspire you, so why not pop over and take a look for yourself.

Good luck with your entry.

Dionne

I am entering this project in the following challenge:

Anything But a Card - Challenge No 39 Steampunktember.