Our first craft challenge

Dear Cheeky,
When we first started talking about having this blog you suggested that we could possibly set each other challenges, and now we have completed the first one. I had the idea that one of us could come up with a quote and the other would come up with some colours and we'd see what we ended up with. You picked the colours - Red, Green, Purple, Black and Blue - and I picked the quote. Friends come and go, like the waves of the ocean, but the true ones stay, like an octopus on your face!

To be honest, I was surprised you actually agreed to go with that one, but I'm glad you did because it was fun to try and figure out what we could do.

I decided that since I have so many sea-themed stamps, I'd try stamping something out. I also have this new die that is designed to make pull tab cards, so my whole plan revolved around using that. I'll get to how well that worked out a bit later.

I had a few different attempts at trying to figure out how to do this, including stamping lots of fish and so on and trying to colour them with my alcohol markers. But then I decided that since it was a water based thing I'd try using water colours.

I gave a piece of water colour paper a blue wash, and tipped the paper so the colour would run, but fad as it went down the page. Then I flicked it with water to get some texture, and left it to dry.

I then started stamping seaweed and coral. I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do, with a draft of the scene, and I figured I'd stamp the pieces, cut them out, and stick them on. But I don't have dies for the seaweed I used. I have dies for other seaweed, but I wanted to use the ones from a set you sent me because they were so pretty. They were just going to be a bastard to cut out.

Adding a wash to the paper

Water droplets added texture

Starting to do the stamping

Mum suggested just stamping on the water colour paper and I ended up doing that. I used memento inks, and some other cheap pigment inks, and did some masking with this awesome re-positional tape I found at a cheap shop. I'll have to get more because it worked really well.

Then I ended up painting over the stamps with watercolour paint anyway.

I had typed up the sentiment on my computer and had even managed to do the line that would be behind the pull tab in a wavy line, so it would fit the die. At first I did it the wrong way around, because i forgot the die would cut the opposite way, but that all got fixed up.

This is what I'd planned on
sticking on the paper

Then, just as I was going to put it through the die cutting machine, as one of the final steps in my project, I realised that it was too wide to fit through my machine.

I said some rude words here.

I ended up cutting a hole with a scalpel, and hand wrote the message.

The way this works is, I have a hole cut into the main picture, lots of foam tape on the back, to lift the page up, a channel for the tab part to run down, and the hidden part of the message is written behind the tab. Then, when you pull the tab the octopus slides across the ocean and lands on the mermaid's face. Sort of. I had a few positioning errors.

But you get the idea!

My plan for the stamping

Cutting the hole for the tab

Foam tape helps it all work

The finished picture

And when you pull the tab -
FACE HUGGER!

I think if I did this sort of thing again I'd use different water colour paper, but other than that everything seemed to come together the way I expected, so that's a good thing.
So yeah, thanks for the challenge. What shall we do next?

The mermaid, a MFT stamp
(Sort of - it's a copy)

The mermaid just chilling

And here she is, with a kaisercraft
octopus attached!