Surround Yourself With Love

• Hi everyone! Melissa here with a design team page for Shimmerz Paints!  I am happy with this page, and I give a lot of credit to Shimmerz for inspiring me with not only their beautiful products, but with their kindness and support!

First I want to tell you which paints I used:

Greener Pastures Inklingz

Penny 4 Your Thoughts Inklingz

Dear John Letter Inklingz

I used a set of Shimmerz new stamps too,  Petite Poppies. I used one flower several times on the page and also a leaf stamp from another set called Bed of Roses. I stamped the leaf with green Tsukineko chalk ink.

How I made this page, in a nutshell:

Apply texture paste with an old credit card and stencils to Blue Fern paper.The paper is from the  Seaside Cottage Collection. I used a stencil from TCW that has a clock frame on the outside, and a big bee on the inside. The stenciled on stars are from a Tim Holtz stencil. I used gesso and glossy accents to adhere layers of textured ribbon to the top and bottom of the page,and painted gesso oveer it. The ribbon look a little like webbing, I painted over the dried gesso with Dear John Letter. 

  Mount photo on watercolor paper, I also adhere a piece of cardstock under the pic itself to make it more durable, and flat. I give dimension to layers with layers of foam core board. 

I cut up die cuts by spellbinders and glued them on around the pic.

 Put gesso, paint, and Clear Rock Candy on chipboard. For the paint on the chipboard I used the Greener Pastures, then while it was wet, added in Penny 4 Your Thoughts. After I applied a very thick coat of Clear Rock Candy and it had dried, I rubbed on a little copper mica powder.

Once I had the above glued on, I started adding all the flowers, glitter, and other embellishments. My last step was to add Penny 4 Your Thoughts Inklingz around the photo, to extend the dark tones of the photo. Now that I've written the short version I'll note all the different sources of the papers and items.

The circle with the sun at the upper right of the photo is from Stamperia, from my local scrapstore, The Scrap Shack, in Friendswood,Texas.  The little bird and quote beneath is from Pion. Anna there gave me a huge amount of papers because she thought I did great work.

The fairy is Graphic 45, she's in the green dress at the top left of the photo.

The blue rose next to the sun paper is 13 Arts, from papers I got in a give away from Aida Domisiewicz. 

If you look to the left of the heart and home word paper, you can see where I stamped with versamark type ink, and copper mica powder.

I've added a lot of pressed flowers from recent walks at the dog park Mack and I go to. The rose leaves are from my yard. The two paper roses on the page are Prima. There are also two very small white paper roses from my local scrap store(LSS) I used two glass pebbles, I mixed water and gold mica powder and painted the paper underneath the pebble, and glued the glass on. See the orange flower thing placed horizontally at the upper right of the pic? I put that there and accidentally left it there. It's from Hob Lob, I got it at the fall clearance, the tiny orange pebbly flower things are from it too. I painted over them with Penny 4 Your Thoughts. The bright yellow flowers are pressed buttercups from the park. I press all the things by putting them in a piece of paper towel, then stick them in my cookbooks in a pile.

The striped feather at the left bottom of the photo is part of a diy earring from Hobby Lobby, in the feathers section. The oval frame item is also from Hob Lob, it has an image of a hot air balloon, under a piece of acrylic.

The found objects metal tag is Tim Holtz, so are the stenciled on stars. The surround yourself with love sticker is from 7 Dots. When I was little my neighborhood was surrounded by woods and fields,and I spent a lot of time in them.This page made me think of those days, and how much I love the emotions they evoke. 

A few years ago, I found parts of a moth in my garage that had gone to moth heaven. They didn't match up to make a whole,and are so fragile, so I gently glued them on the page. 

To add visual interest I applied the following: mica flakes, micro beads, seed beads,sequins, a few Swarovski crystals,rhinestones, feathers from my yard,metal glitter, pearls, part of a broken pearl necklace,rusty metal pieces from Finnabair,lichen, shells, birch tree bark(a neighbor told me never to peel it off the tree because that could hurt the tree, so these are pieces I found on the ground by it.),lichen,dried moss, and gauze threads.

The bee by the left of the photo is from 49 and Market. I got a few pieces of paper from my LSS,there was one with just cut outs on it of fairies and things.

The cherry blossom chipboard is from Dusty Attic. 

I love the way pressed flowers look on a page.

You can see some foliage to the left of the Prima flower that's from 49 and Market.

The hummingbird is from an old calendar.

You can see copper mica powder to the left of the feather, I've been hoarding it for years, and use it very sparingly.Maybe I can find more online. It's from Jaquard at Hobby Lobby. It's coarser and shinier than regular mica powder. I used it there and around the page in a various areas. 

to the right of the grey feather at the bottom of the page I used a leaf stamp from a Shimmerz set. I used green chalk ink, and used it several more times around the page.