Anything Goes - Corset Montage

Hello Again

Well July and August are really busy months for me, so apologies for the lack of blogging! Sadly the project I've been working on for my sister's 50th birthday isn't finished yet to enter into this month's Clarity Challenge, but maybe it will fit the brief for one of the months to come. Luckily for me, it isn't Jackie's birthday until the end of August, so I have some more time to get it done and for it to be dry enough to be packed into my suitcase!!!

As a result, here's a little card I did which is part of my "using stuff up" theme for 2015. We all have hundreds of little scraps of coloured and patterned papers left over from previous projects, that we just can't bear to part with, don't we? At least I hope everyone else has them too, and it isn't just peculiar to me!

Years ago I attended a workshop where I learnt about paper piecing, and truly it's not something I've done that often, but it's a great way of using up those little bits of lovely paper, so I've been doing it a lot in my projects this year, and the boxes and files of papers and scraps are gradually reducing.

Here I've used some of the very first Clarity stamps that I ever bought, the lady's corset and corset montage stamp, together with the Feminine script stamp, and some die cut flowers, punched leaves and a few gems for a bit of bling. It's lovely to get out your old stamps and enjoy them all over again, isn't it?

I really like the effect of the scripts stamped onto a patterned background, but as the patterns on the papers are quite busy, I stuck with three main colours in my palette, bright pink, green and white, with stamping done in black archival ink.

I used the same polka dot paper to stamp the corset, for the largest matting layer, and for one layer of the die cut flowers. The corset was then cut out, and stuck onto the corset montage as a contrast layer. The corset montage was matted onto plain sage green card, and offcuts were used to punch out the leaves. A plain pink scrap of paper was also used to die cut the second layer of flowers.

In retrospect, I wish I'd had enough plain pink paper to do another matt around the spotty paper, but hey ho - I was using up leftovers, and there wasn't enough to do that ... maybe next time!

Thanks for visiting, and any comments you have would be really welcome.  Susan x