One of the ladies in my building is about 8 and a half months pregnant and is counting the days until her family is blessed with another little bundle of joy. We’ve been chatting over the last few weeks and she has been telling me about all the exhausting preparations that her and her husband have been putting in place. Their daughter Erin was moving to another bedroom, so that the new arrival could have Erin’s old room, which is already decorated as a nursery. I found her stories hilarious, as she told of how little miss Erin picked out the colour sheme and design features for her new room. She knew exactly what she wanted: lilac and silver, with butterflies. She has been loving the control of picking out wallpaper, window blinds, and even door knobs for the cupboards and drawers in the shape of butterflies. After our brief conversation, I was feeling inspired by Erin’s choice of colour combination, and decided to make a little something for her as a finishing touch to her room.
I made this cute little wall hanging from bits and pieces in my craft room, and when I was done, I realised that you could even use this as a bedroom door name plaque. So let me walk you through how I made this cute little gift.
I wanted the base of the project to be pretty sturdy so I considered using foam board or mount board. Then I stumbled across some Bind It All white book covers in a small 6 x 6 size, and I knew this would be perfect. Next I cut a piece of lilac cardstock from Stampin Up to be 4″ x 4″. The original idea was that when this lilac cardstock was stuck down, the white area around the outside would look almost like a photo frame, but I found the difference between the lilac and the white was too stark. So to add a soft feminine touch, on top of the white chipboard cover, I stuck a piece of pattern paper from the DCWV Floral Prints paper stack, which I had cut to 5.5″ x 5.5″.
Instead of placing the lilac cardstock straight unto the lilac pattern paper, I reached for some white cardstock & my Stampin Up scallop border punch, as I knew this would both carry the soft feminine theme, and also create a frame of contrasting colour around the lilac monotone cardstock. Before matting all the layers together completely, I drew on some fake stitching around the edges of the lilac cardstock using a paper piercer, a ruler and a white gel pen. Cute!
Next I hunted out all my chipboard letters and found some which would fit nicely into the lilac area, with just a little overhang for artistic effect. I went for these ones from Maya Road and painted them quickly with some white gesso. I stuck these to a piece of scratch paper using a temporary adhesive tape runner, and stamped some cute flowers and bugs on them using some Stampin Up stamps and some Studio g clear stamps along with ‘Wisteria’ fluid chalk ink from Colorbox. I love this fluid chalk ink, and I am often overcome by the urge to by more and more of them. I stuck the chipboard letters to the project using foam dots, for added dimension.
For a finishing touch I definitely needed some butterflies, so I embossed these great butterfly stamps from the Garden Whimsy collection from Stampin Up. All that remained was to add a few gems, a little touch of ‘crystal’ stickles glitter glue, and two eyelets using my crop-o-dile. The cord which I have used is actually some which was left over from a few Christmases ago, and I believe we got a roll for less that £1 at tescos, and it looks great on craft projects such as this.
I hope Erin likes it.
