Hope & Change

NOPE - this is not a political post! Thank goodness

that all the adds and phone calls are O-V-E-R.

This post is about two great ATCs that I made today. They came out of an idea to use Tim Holtz' Tissue wrap over chipboard cut out shapes. 

I am submitting these in the following challenges this week:
Frilly and Funky - This week's Challenge is Tic-Tac-Toe three in a row!! I went straight down the middle with Chipboard, Metallic Distress Stains and sprays. Frilly and Funkie awards a winner with a wonderful 25.00 gift card to their shop, woot!! 

I have two swaps that are due this month, one is for the AllthingsTim yahoo group and the other is for a group that I swap with offline each month. 
For my Tim group the theme this month is Forest Floor and when I think of the forest floor in Mid November I really think of falling leaves and sometimes snow. I'm from Colorado and we usually have snow by mid November. So for this ATC, I used two Tim Holtz Big dies, Tattered Leaves and Winter Wonder. I cut out one leaf and the snowflake with chipboard and adhered it to a piece of burnt orange card stock and then used glue to adhere tissue wrap over them, for some reason I did not use Tim's tissue wrap on this ATC (what was I thinking?). I sort of crunched it up and smooshed it around with my fingers while it was still wet so it would have a wrinkle effect, but it really got messy with the thin tissue wrap, I finally made it stay. Once it was dry I trimmed the edges and went over the entire thing with Paint Dabbers in Gold and a tad  bit of Espresso. I wanted to give it some shimmer so I added Metallic Distress stains in Tarnished Brass first and then added a lot of Brushed Pewter to the snowflake. I also used Distress Ink in Walnut Stain over the leaf. Once that was all really dry, I cut small letters to spell out the word "Change" in black card Stock. I used Tim's Typeset strip die for the letters. 
I wanted those to pop a little more so I also used Adorandak sprays in two colors mixed together to make an oval shape on the right hand side so the letters would stand out a little more. For the last step I added a little doodling around the word "change."
I really love the way it turned out, simple but classic. 
I think the snow and leaves definitely go hand in hand in November.

The "Hope" ATC was for a swap that I join once a month. This group is offline and the theme this month is "One Word".. what better word than HOPE?

For this one I used the Tim dies "Love Struck" movers and shapers (heart) and the word Die "Hope" and of course card board. The words are normally inside of an oval and I just cut them out. 
So for this the steps in the beginning are the same, EXCEPT this time I used Tim's Tissue Wrap, it worked SO much better. Since it's thicker it holds up so much better to all the paint and sprays. After everything was dry, I used white picket fence paint dabber over the entire thing first. After that was dry I sprayed the entire thing with different colors of Dyan Reaveley's sprays but concentrating mostly on the blue. Once that was comepltely dry I went over the words, heart and edges with Distress Ink in Black Soot, just to make them really stand out. Finally I sprayed the entire thing with a little bit of silver perfect pearl spray, you know how I love my shimmer!!

So those are my finished ATCs for this months swaps. YAY!