Deb's "Guest entry" In Sharon's Vintage Circus Round 2 Journal

Firstly, I have to tell you what an absolutely stunning piece of art this journal is, Sharon and I am so thankful you let me have a "Guest Spot"  in it as I am a Round 3 Blogger/Journal entrant. She's ready to come home!

I started with Distress paints in Fossilized Amber and Candied Apple which I applied to the paper with baby wipes, blending it all. I also stamped a vintage globe/map stamp in Archival Ink randomly across both pages.

I had already cut out my images in Black and red plain card-stock using my Pazzles Inspiration machine. The Circus tent image I resized several times and cut out block silhouettes of a bear, monkey and unicorn as well as a Signpost. I left out the Hippo insert, crossed out the sign and then wrote "Unicorn" on the signpost , as we would all pay money to see one of those! I then shuffled these images around the first page till I was happy and stuck then down with gel medium. I also used on eof the Admit One coupons that I was asked to include in my spread, after I crumpled it and then covered it with Distress inks in Vintage Photo and Black Soot . I then applied a coat of Prima Clear Crackle texture paste over it all and let it dry. it looked a bit bare still, so i stamped some background texture stamps in archival coffee and some stars in pink.

For the right page I stuck down the large red circus tent with gel medium. I then filled in a piece of watercolor paper with some Lindy's Stamp Gang Colorshots Sprays in Lump'o'coal and green. These are such gorgeous metallic colours that have a lot of pigment to them. I then had a Kaisercraft stamp and die set that I absolutely adore (funnily enough named Elephant) and stamped it onto my prepared water colour paper using archival ink in black. But it turned out light gray so you couldn't see all that lovely Zentangle detail on the elephant. So I decided to re stamp with embossing ink and used gold embossing powder to create raised texture on the elephant. It didn't work out as nice as I had hoped but it is still lovely to see. When I recreate this for my own journal, I think I will use a Black pigment ink to stamp with and then use clear embossing powder so it should hopefully stand out more. Anyway. I then journaled in my own writing (which I am NOT a fan of) on the left and finished off with the quote that came with the stamp set on the right. I used Stampers anonymous Mini Circque Alpha Stamps to stamp the title and a flattened beer bottle cap that I had saved from some beer my husband tried at the start of the year when I first started thinking about this entry. It says "3 Pub Circus Australia" which I LOVE! to make my gorgeous elephant pop some more I stuck on a mixture of small and large iridescent sequins around the page and finished off with small spots of glossy accents.

In conclusion, I have really enjoyed this journal spread and I hope you do as well Sharon. I will post her off back to you on Monday! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone from our Journal swaps. Wishing you all the best for today and the year ahead.

Deb Stephens.