Floral Mini-Album Pt 13 More Work on Page 1

Recently I made a new mini-album, about my mum who died in December. I was unable to publish anything about this until now because it is a present for her best friend, who sometimes visits my blog, and I wanted it to be a surprise for her. I wrote a series of blog posts as I did each stage of the project, so I didn’t forget what I did, and they will be published in sequence now the project is finished and has been given to our friend.

If you want to see the finished project, please click here.

Returning to page 1, it definitely needed more work as it was rather boring – this is what it looked like:

I distressed around the edges first of all, using Barn Door, Dusty Concord and finally Black Soot Distress Inks, and then added some Infusions – Violet Storms and Violetta. I was really not happy with the result, which just looked a bit of a mess in my opinion!

Here is the page laid in place, to see what it looked like beside the inside of the front cover. Hmmm.

So I decided to add some Distress Oxides. I didn’t want to smoosh the page on my craft sheet as I would have very little control and I didn’t want to mess up the other side of the page either, so I decided on a new approach – did I invent this? Probably not – I expect others have done the same, but for now I shall call it Shoshi’s Directed Smooshing! What I did was rub the ink pad on the craft sheet as normal, and spritz it with water, and then pick up the ink on a small acrylic block and use this to smoosh onto the surface of the page. This actually worked pretty well.

I started with Wilted Violet, but it was all too pink-purple and I thought it needed a bit more orange, so I added Spiced Marmalade, which looked OK until I dried it with the heat gun, when it promptly started to turn green!! Too much else already on the page and it was obviously reacting with it. So I tried adding some Fossilised Amber and that did help a bit. The final one I tried was Fired Brick which didn’t really show up at all. This was the result. Hmmmm again.

You can see that during this session, I also made the tags to go in these pages, cut from remnants of the same paper used to line the inside of the front cover, to try to tie the two pages in together. With the tag in place on the page, it doesn’t look too bad.

Here is the page, again laid alongside the front cover. I think this will have to do – I’m not over-thrilled with the result.

With all the water treatment and repeated drying with the heat gun, the whole page got a bit buckled, so it had the heavy books treatment overnight in the hope that it would flatten it out OK.

I think it will be OK once I get lots of embellishments on it, which will distract one’s eye a bit!

Note added later: With time, this page really grew on me until in the end, I am very pleased with it. Sometimes it’s best not to jump to conclusions but to sit with it for a while and then decide.