Thank You Canvas

Please note that this was actually primarily written last week (and I continued to write in that mode to finish it) and I ran out of time to complete and post before I left, so all actually refers to the weekend just gone, apologies!

Tom's Mormor (Swedish for Mum's Mum, I love that their language shows this distinction, it is so much more easy than our rather more worder Mum's Mum or Grandma Jean (My Mum's mum) and then explaining who that is!) has been ill and in the hospital :( This weekend Tom and I are flying out to Sweden with his mum to visit her. If you read my blog regularly you may remember the Thinking of You card I made for her a weeks ago (the one with the frog - Grodan in Swedish (not sure of spelling) but Grodan is also used as a term of affection, often by Grandparents when referring to their grandchildren, hence my use of the frog). Anyway once again I am rambling, as she is currently unable to walk she managed to persuade the nurse to take the 20 minute walk to reception to collect her post from England! She was very excited to receive post from her family in England and liked the hand made card very much indeed, so much so she has asked me to make something as a Thank You present for the staff on her ward. I decided that they must receive lots of cards and that a card wouldn't stand out enough, hence choosing to make a canvas.

Tom likes my ink blended background cards at the moment, in particular the one I made for the Lavinia 'Add Some Glitter' challenge in August, so asked that I incorporated this style of design on my canvas. As it turns out ink blending is a lot harder on canvas!!! I found that you needed a lot more ink to provide the intensity of colour that I was after, even using the foams rather than the brushes (I like the foams when I want a deeper colour and for a paler colour I would choose the inkylicious brushes every time)!

Choosing my colours

In progress

With the masking strips removed (Time to let the ink dry for an hour or two!)

The ink blending for this canvas used the same technique as my previous ink blending cards - tearing strips of paper (I had to use a 12 by 12 piece of paper for this canvas as it was quite large) using my Creative Memories tearing tool, laying them on my canvas at the appropriate height (leaving a small amount of white space at the top and a larger area at the bottom for the next part of my idea), I then blended all of my colours from dark to light (three shades of red went into the red area alone to increase vibrancy - Barn Door Distress Ink, Real Red Stampin' Up and Lipstick Red Colourbox Chalk Ink - moving on to Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink, Wild Honey Distress Ink and Daffodil Delight by Stampin' Up). This took over an hour to build up layers of colour and then blend them together so that the seams between the colours did not show, I'm quite pleased with the result, I think the colours blended perfectly together (I used the other edge of my foam, not the one I had inked, to pull the colours into one another without using more ink, a technique I have found to work quite well). The canvas texture shines through the ink to add more intrigue to the piece :)

Finished canvas (which was then added to a black frame, forgot to take a picture though...DOH!)

The Alium are two stamp sets, the smaller by Lavinia and the larger, a separate stem with different options for heads, by Inkylicious, the Thank you is also by Inkylicious (I used this project as an excuse to make a slightly large (6 stamp sets + new ink dusters + a stencil) order from them!! The seed heads were glittered in red, orange and gold. I'm trying really hard to ignore the slight smudging on the right hand stem and on the Thank you (a result of rushing to finish late at night before flying too early in the morning) but being slightly too OCD I am not happy and wanted to throw the whole project in the bin!! I'm glad I didn't as Tom's Mormor was really pleased with it, though I still didn't want to put my name to it!

Thanks for reading,

- Rebecca