Sprucing Up A Cover & I WON!!

I am so excited about this post for a few reasons. .....
One -  The wonderful Mrs. Linda Ledbetter over at Studio L3 was so generous with her last give-a-way. She was giving away a wonderful embroidered apron and she even offered to take it to CHA and have Tim and Mario sign it.!!  I was the lucky winner of this apron and I got it in the mail yesterday. To my surprise it also came with a bunch of goodies, Linda is so generous!! Way generous!! She even made me a beautiful butterfly card.  Here is a pic of my goodies:

Thank you SO MUCH Linda!! It was all so unexpected and wonderful. Your amazing!! 

Another reason I'm excited about this post is that I bought a Dyan Reaveley journal and I'm SO loving it. Well the cover of these journals are blank so that you can really do you own creation on the front so I decided I was going to re-do mine and do something with my cover. I also entered this into the new challenge over at Frilly and Funky which is Spruce it Up. I hope this cover qualifies as a Spruce It Up project, I feel like I did my best to spruce it up. haha!! (how many times can I say that?)

Here is my cover....

To start this multi layered cover I painted my entire cover with Claudine Hellmuth's blank canvas white paint. I love that it's thick and creamy. Once dry I stamped some word background stamps in various colors onto the white. 

So to prep the next layer I used Tim Holtz masking sheets to cut out the designs and flower and the umbrella man and adhered those items to the white here and there. Like the diamonds in the upper right corner. Once those were in place (the mask sheets are great because they are sticky so I knew they wouldn't move) I placed three different colors of Claudine Hellmuth's paints onto my craft sheet and rolled my brayer through one at a time and went across the cover here and there. 

I really tried to blend them equally and make it all random. Once that was done I used Archival stamp pads and misc Tim and Wendy Vecchi  stamps to randomly stamp here and there. I love how you can still see the words in the background behind some of the paint. 

Once that was all dry I took off the masks that I had created and WHALLA! The white is still there through the paint. I then used the reverse part of the umbrella man mask (the outline portion) and stuck it down where my umbrella man was at. I then used some random stamps to fill him in so he wasn't completely white anymore.  I also used a black marker and went around the white designs and umbrella man so they would stand out more. I added a few dots and lines as well. 

I had to add some Dyan Reaveley stuff as well so i stamped the circles on a seperate sheet of paper and colored them and glued those on top here and there. I added some white paint circles as well. I might add a word or two later but I am just loving how it turned out. :)

Thanks for hanging with me today.

Oh, almost forgot, here are the cool masks once I took them off! How cool do they look all painted up and stuff?? I might have to use them permanently on a page sometime.

On the right is the reverse umbrella man I used to stamp inside his outline.