"That's my Boy" by Melissa Struhs

Hello Again and thanks for dropping by the blog to see what the team has been up to this week!

I love the impact of oversized photo enlargements on a layout, but of course this leaves little room to get your Colour Blast product on. However, I will use this as an excuse to lay down a simple stencil and create a little detail in a corner or along an edge.

Firstly, I began with stamping stitched circular elements onto white cardstock with a black Staz on ink.

Then, a little fussy cutting around the shapes to really make them stand out.

My title has been inked with a platnium ink and had a Colour Embossing Powder in Steel heat set over the top.

A cute little label stamp has been inked with a powder blue and stamped twice onto white cardstock also.

Two images were created, one is remains unchanged 

and the other had the Steel Colour Embossing Powder added to it. 

You can see that I have used a 7 Dots Studio paper as my background, positioned two of my stamped circles in opposite corners and and then layered a stencil image over them.

The Snow White Colour Paste creates such a soft glittery effect over the white cardstock and light teal colouring of the paper.

The same stencil was used with Singin' the Blues and Snow White Colour Paste 

over the strip of patterned paper and photo enlargement. I think that some people still are quite reluctant to try this as they worry they will make a mess on the image and there is no salvaging it...I find that not overloading your palette knife with too much paste and only making a few gentle passes over the stencil prevents too many dramas.

But, if anything is less than perfect...there is always the option of layering other embellishments over the top to cover it. Here is a close up of the stamped label image, my powder blue print was trimmed and layered over the embossed Steel,

title and the photo stencilling.

I continued to build more embellishments, with the addition of a chipboard steampunk clock and corner flourish. These were inked with a chalky white colour

and spritzed with a Snow White Colour Shimmer Spray

The flourish was tucked into the lower corner of my photo

and the clock was mounted on a neutral patterned paper and overlapped over the top edge of the photo.

and all of the elements have now come together to create a soft and whimsical look for a black and white baby photo.

That's all from me till next time, have a crafty weekend!

Mel.