Hello, friends!

Today I’m sharing a layout I made using most of what I had left of the September kit- which worked out perfectly for the today’s theme of “We’re Bringing Sexy Back: NO RULES and NO FEAR! So, I got out of my comfort zone with using a variety of bright colors, and added black, and even added some elegant gold, just because!

I loved the bold colors of the Prima Marketing chipboard alphas, and I knew I wanted to pair the green and pink with the teal and the black cardstock from the kit to make a dramatic color combination. Normally, I would never add an antique gold to this combo because it doesn’t necessarily “match” but I didn’t worry about it for this layout because… NO RULES! (And, it actually looks good.) So, here is the layout:

I admit it, I am completely addicted to flowers- It’s a rare practice for me not to include them on every project. The only problem is that I was out of flowers from the kit, so I made my own from the teal cardstock that I gutted- there’s a 10-inch square of the cardstock taken from the center so I could use it for the bottom layer, and use the rest to cut out flowers! I inked the paper with three different shades of blue to get a unique look. I also added one of the Crate Paper Carousel clips, “You Shine Bright” on the photo creating a triangle of teal around the photo to draw the eye right to it.

This close up shows some detail of the flowers and, and also some of the detail on that gold frame. the frame is cut from the Prima Marketing Paintables watercolor paper. There are lots of layers on it. First, I thought I would color the frame with the Ancient Coin (gold) Twinkling H2O’s, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I painted it again with some sparking gold paint that had a thicker consistency, and then traced the black accents printed on the paper with some Stickles in black, and I still wasn’t happy with it, so I decided to use cover the whole frame with embossing powder when the paint and the Stickles were drying, but still wet enough to make the embossing powder stick to some of the spots. Then I used some black artisan powder (it’s like matte mica powder) to tone down the gold.

Also in that close up you can see some stenciling that I did using the Twinkling H2O’s. I wanted to add some green and pink accents to coordinate with the alphas. Here’s a tutorial on how I got the results:

How to Use Twinkling H2O’s with Stencils

The pink alphabet chipboard has a few different shades of pink, and I wanted my stenciling to also have the different shades of pink, so I chose to make my paste a light shade of pink.

I started with adding water to the Playful Pansy (pink) Twinkling H2O pot to activate it. I let it sit for about 10 minutes, occasionally stirring the pot to help make a thick consistency.

I added the H2O liquid from the pot to some modeling paste.

And, stirred it up, adding more until I was happy with the color.

This color matches the lightest of the pink shades on the chipboard.

Next, I put all of my elements on my page to get basic idea of where I want to add my stenciling because I wanted the images to be peeking out from under the flowers. I crudely traced where the elements are with a pencil, so I was able to erase it once done with the stenciling.

I used a stencil from my stash- it’s newer one from Kaisercraft. Any floral stencil would be great to use.

I added the modeling paste with a palette knife.

I allowed the stenciling to dry, and saw that there was a part I didn’t like that looked like the image had been cut off, so I scraped a little of the modeling paste off, and decided I would paint over it with black paint if the flowers didn’t cover up the parts I wasn’t happy with (but, it turned out not to be an issue because the teal flowers did cover it up).

Next, I pulled out the Playful Peony and Pretty Peridot (green) H2O’s to paint over the stenciling .

Here’s what the pink looks like:

And, then I added green to the rest of the stenciling that was vines and leaves.

Here’s another look at the end result:

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at my project and checking out my tutorial!