Grow (fun with mixed media art)

Inspiration is everywhere and my latest project is inspired by a picture of a quilt I saved from a sales catalog!  This quilt had a floral design and the flower petals were made of ribbon and, well, I have tons of ribbon and I knew making ribbon flower petals would be a fun way to use some of it!  (Ok, this didn't put a dent in my ribbon stash but it's a start, LOL!)  So while I was organizing some of my craft stash, which occasionally involves looking in my file of ideas, my creative mojo kicked in!  A piece of leftover fabric from another project, the quilt picture and inspiration from a crafty video, I knew what I wanted to create.  This is my project Grow!

 

To create this art piece, I first grabbed some ribbon and cut 8 strips of approximately 3" pieces.  For the flower stem, I cut about a 4" length of rick rack.  I used hot glue to form each petal then glued each piece on top of the brown fabric.  Then, I glued down the rick rack at a slight curve.  I also needed a flower center and from my box of embellishments, I decided on a red button.  To spruce up the design, I added a few rhinestones and some smaller buttons.  Next, I pulled a 6" x 8" stretched canvas out of my craft stash.  I placed the fabric floral piece on top of the canvas to figure out my layout but what would I do about that plain white background?

I needed to add some color to the canvas and so I dug into my fabric stash and found a charm pack called Boundless Batiks by Boundless Fabrics.  It was a free gift that came along with a purchase I made from Craftsy several years ago.  The colors in this pack were perfect and I picked several different squares and starting cutting the fabric into various shapes and sizes.  I used Aleene's tacky glue to adhere the fabric pieces to the canvas and where I overlapped the fabric, I used Aleene's fabric fusion glue.  After the canvas was mostly covered (fabric wasn't needed in the center area where the flower panel would be placed), I used fabric fusion to adhere the flower panel to the canvas.  At this point, it did look great but I felt the design was not complete.  As I pondered, I looked through my craft stash.

Finally; I found a word sticker, I hand cut a leaf from the fabric and adhered both to the background with the Aleene's glue.  For the finishing touch, I brushed on a few colors of Distress Ink (spiced marmalade, walnut stain & fired brick) sparingly over various parts of the design.  Now it's complete!  This was quite a relaxing project to work on as I told myself to just let the creative juices flow and not mull over my creativity choices but go with my first instinct - this is meant to be fun!