A class, a triptych and a steampunk challenge

Last Tuesday I went to another workshop at Snazzy Stamping which was to create a triptych inspired by Anna Dabrowska aka Finnabair.  My friend Pen and I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening and once we got into the zone we would happily have gone on creating all night (and I think Val might even have let us! lol).  Unfortunately time ran out and I finally had time to finish my triptych today.  There's definitely a Finn element but I went off on my own trail as well.

Finn's main way of working is to create her piece with anything that happens to be to hand (washers, paper clips, poppers, zips etc) and then spray it with ink - often black.  It takes a lot of courage to do this to your beloved creation because you could quite likely completely ruin it but I'm very happy with the way it turned out.

I sprayed the black ink through a stencil to add some interest and used shrink plastic cogs to decorate  left from another project (amongst other things).  I also liberally finger painted the embellishments with cream to help bring it all together.

This September's challenge on Happy Daze is Steampunkery so in view of the cogs and the grunginess, I thought I'd enter. they can always chuck me out if it's not steampunk enough lol. There's also a new Steampunk Junkies challenge site  - looks like this will be fun.

EDIT: The guys over at Steampunk Junkies have been kind enough to choose me as the winner on their challenge.  I feel it's only fair to share this with Val, the owner of Snazzy Stamping who's class it was that led to it's creation so congratulations Val!! :)

Steampunk Workshop

I spent a wonderfully messy evening here on Tuesday.  I got completely lost on the way and thought at one point I was never going to make it but thanks to a generally good sense of direction and the GPS on my phone I arrived in time.

Val the shop owner had prepared 3 different samples for us to make and I chose the one below.  We used stamps from the Chocolate Baroque Steampunkery plate to work with alongside Tim Holtz cogs dies and texture fades embossing folders.  (I used the diamond plate as my background). If anyone's got a stash of black shrink plastic they haven't used for ages it makes wonderful 3D cogs.

Obviously you can get all the items for this piece from Snazzy's.  It's an absolute treasure trove of stamping supplies!

Steampunk'd

Recently I bought a stencil frame which has cogs all round it (can't remember who's) but did you know that you can run your stencils through an embossing machine? So along with all my other stencils which I obviously had to try out, I came up with a couple of backgrounds from this one and from there evolved the two cards below.

The cut out images are Graphic 45 Steampunk Debutante and I've used Spellbinders cogs dies.The metal corner embellishments are upholstery tacks.

I raided my other half's supplies of sticky aluminium roll from the garage, stuck it to some card and ran the dies through the machine and then dabbed them with alcohol ink for the metallic effect.  The shrink plastic words I have had in my stash for about ten years!  If you enlarge the pictures, you can see that I've coloured the TH Idea-ology word bands with brown Staz-on to match with the rest of the colour scheme and to make the words stand out I highlighted the words with picket fence Distress Stain.