Welcome February

The Creative Jumpstarts for 2013 finished with the end of January. I've really enjoyed having quick things to do during the holidays, but am ready to get involved in some bigger projects, and I really miss stitching. Here's a few of my last experiments from prompts I've followed in the Jumpstarts.
Another background from Natalie Kalbach - applying gesso to a page and then adding texture to it while wet

The colour was applied with my neocolor II watersoluble crayons - above is the initial application of colour. Once wet the colours blended more. Then I decided to add some extra circles of colour, and you can see in the bottom left I briefly toyed with the idea of turning them into flowers

I hated this...the good news is that a baby wipe can remove the unwanted colour and now I have a background that I want to use. I like the marks in the gesso - especially the date stamp and circles.

Next up another watersoluble technique from Dina Wakley using crayons and water on a stamp.

I love the ethereal look of this technique. Last year she shared her jumpstart video at the end of March so keep an eye on her blog if you are interested in this. She also showed us the very cool idea of using a wet (with water) brush to outline images that you wish you tear out of paper - the water line makes the tearing simple.
And will finish with another resist technique, again from Nathalie. For my first sample I painted the page a turquoisey blue, then stamped with the versamark pad on dirty (unintentionally!) stamps before embossing with the clear powder. I rubbed green paint over to reveal the resist technique.

Not quite as her example turned out but I still like the resulting background. Here's a close-up to show the lovely raised shine of the stamped designs.

Then I thought I'd try it again on ordinary paper so this is a page from my Full Tilt Boogie Journal.

Page with clear embossing added

The page as it stands now had a wash of watercolour added over the embossing, then I added different flower shapes and embossed them with Tim Holtz' distress embossing powder : antique linen. The last layer of flowers was done with perfect pearls gold and is the less filled-in flower. 

Don't know whether I can bear to cover it up now!!
Have a great weekend.