My Favorite Stamp, Shabby Chic-afied

So, this week, Simon Says Show Us Your Favorite Stamp (except they spell it favourite).  Which means I am pretty much assured of being able to use whatever I create for the Grungy Monday challenge as well.  As long as stamping is involved.  There I am, early Monday morning, waiting for it to be 8am my time, so I can see what Linda L. has planned for us.  And it is a great stamping (yea!) technique from Tim.  In fact, it dates way back to December 2007, one of the 12 Tags of Christmas, and it is called shabby chic.

It's always difficult to select a favorite anything.....stamp, color, song, book.....there are so many and for most of us the concept of favorite is kind of fluid.  That being said, I do know what ONE of my most beloved stamps is, so I'm using that one.  It is the artsy chick stamp from Wendy Vecchi's Art Rules set,  and I do use it a lot.  Also I just liked the idea of doing artsy chick in shabby chic.  First I just played around with the technique on scrap paper, trying different paint colors. Looking at the array of samples on my work table, I was hit with an idea.  If one artsy chick is good, how great would eight be?  And this is what came out of that:

Each part is ATC size, and they are done on black foam board.  Which I painted black as per Tim's directions, because I found out the hard way that the technique just works better on a painted surface.
And, because I had just scored a bunch of metallic paints, I used them instead of the paint dabbers and I absolutely love this variation.  The bits of gold, however, were done with a paint dabber and a stencil.  I added some number rub-ons (which I sanded a bit to shabbify them) and decided it would be more interesting if they were out of order.  Then I just arranged them on a larger piece of foam board, and it is, as they say, ready to hang.



It's always a little difficult for me to photograph anything with a shimmer, so I hope this close up gives you a better idea of how the metallics work.