My Creative Affaire...: Holiday Inspirations

I can't believe it's August - where did July go? Sorry it has been so long since my last post. The last half of June and all of July was taken up with moving back to Boston from Australia and creating, creating and more creating. I had two fun workshops to design and teach in my local area in June and then it was time to work on all those CHA projects. CHA is a crazy time of the year but it's also a super fun time of the year. Oh how I love to have those brand new products in my hands, my mind goes into overtime!! This year I had fun working with all the new Graphic 45 collections, ABC Primer, Christmas Emporium and The Magic of Oz. Each collection is very different but they are all amazing. Over the next few weeks I will be posting photos and some tutorials of nearly all the projects I created (a few were picked up for publication so I can't show those but I will let you know when they are out in print).

The first project I would like to share with you is a Christmas Emporium Wall Art piece. Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know how much I love to create wall art. For me, wall art is a great way to showcase a paper collection and I absolutely love to display them in my home or to give to someone special as a gift (as I have already done with this piece). A piece like this can be displayed year after year.

When creating a piece of wall art, I always choose the frame first and then make enough panels to fit within the frame. For this piece, I bought the frame and then I cut my own mat and bought an additional frame on clearance to use the moulding from to fit around the edges of the mat. I simply measured all four sides and then with a tiny saw trimmed down the moulding so it would fit. I then glued the moulding down with a hot glue gun.

Each of the layers in the wall art have a piece of chipboard between them to give the papers extra body and then each layer is adhered together with foam mounting tape for dimension. Once I had cut all my layers using the scalloped rectangle nestabilies from Spellbinders, I then chose my decorative pieces for each panel. Once all the panels were complete, I went back and gave them all special touches with pearls, stickles for some sparkle and extra cut pieces of holly etc.

After placing the panels into the frame, I adhered two chipboard flourishes from Imaginarium Designs which I had painted with Gold Metallic paint to the mat with foam mounting tape. The little black tag that reads "Christmas Emporium" was cut from the Chipboard Tag packaging and was also adhered with foam mounting tape.