Butterflies Stamps Shrink Plastic Charm bracelet

Good morning everyone, hope you are well :-) Its Elaine here with my inspiration piece for you today.
I decided to share with you a make using one of my favourite mediums for crafting which you can use to create lots of different looks and for lots of different kinds of crafts! Its a great way for using your existing stamps in a new way too :-)
What youll need to create something like my project is Shrink plastic, stamps (I used Sarah's butterfly rubber stamps here), Stazon ink pad, hole punch, scissors, glittered gel pens, jump rings, bead spacers, tiger tail, crimps, toggle clasps and basic jewellery tools.
First of all youll create your shrink plastic charms. Choose your stamp and ink up with Stazon. Stamp onto the rough side of the shrink plastic. Next colour your butterflies should you choose to do so (you can see I left one uncoloured on the end to show the look without colour) I find glittered gel pens work the best with this, but do be careful not to smudge the ink as it dries.
Cut around your butterfly but leave a border around the top to punch before you cut all the way round. Punch in the centre, then cut carefully around this hole, leaving enough plastic to keep this intact.
Follow the shrinking instructions on your shrink plastic, then place in a heavy book when warm to make sure they dry flat.
Take your finished charms and your jewellery kit and add jump rings to the holes. I added two jump rings on each charm to give a good swing from my bracelet. I then created a design for my bracelet using Rose Quartz, pearls and bead spacers with butterfly charms placed equally between this design. Finish with your clasp.
You can always use shrink plastic to make your own embellishments for cards, scrapbook pages-anything you can think of! You could even use without a hole and stick it directly onto a project with strong glue.

Playing with textures

Everybody has their 'thing' and I'm so happy when I'm using textures, in fact as I was making this piece I found myself actually smirking. (That's not sad is it?)

Anyway I thought I'd share with you how to make a similar background to mine whether it's for a journal page or a card topper, it's easy.

For starters you'll need a sturdy piece of card to work on. You need something substantial to hold all those mediums and layers. I used 300gsm mixed media paper but you could use a piece of cardboard just as well.

The first layer is gesso spread with a card. Not too thick but just like spreading butter on a piece of bread.

Stamp into the wet gesso. I used a new hexagon background stamp by Sarah. Please please please make sure you wash the stamp straight away after. Fill a bowl with warm soapy water if you know you can't wash it straight away as once the paint has dried it'll ruin your stamps.

Once the gesso is dry use a stencil to add texture paste. Use a card once again to wipe the paste through the stencil. I used the Chevron Stripe stencil.

You can also start to glue on some 3d embellishments. The thread, chipboard star and wooden leaves were all included in my monthly Kit Club kit but you can find lots of embellishments here in the shop. Once dry go over them with some gesso so they blend into the background more.

The fun bit is adding spray ink. You'll see the texture start to really pop out of the page at this point. 

Randomly stamp across the page.  Again I've gone for some of the Kit club stamps but it could be any stamps just to add an extra layer.

To finish my page off I layered some of Sarah's journaling cards from the Documented 365 range  together along with the film strip printed from the Say Cheese digi kit (I use this a lot printed onto acetate) and all held together with some staples. I stuck this down to the page and gave it a light covering of gesso just to stop it taking over the page too much. 

So there you have it. I really hope I can inspire you to try some texture and have fun. 

Jaine x