3 Wise Monkeys, Well Traveled

Good morning, Flockinistas! Melissa here, and I recently got to play with Carta Bella's Well Traveled collection, and let me tell you, I had tons of fun! I spent tons of time distressing and adding my own touches to the papers to give it my mixed media feel, and I really love the results!

If you've never had the pleasure to touch the Carta Bella paper, you are really missing out! It's a very high-quality, durable, paper. It can take the worst of your scraping, your painting, wetting, and wrinkling! I really had a lot of fun trying out tons of techniques on it. I really loved the patterns, but I'm not usually a fan of using them as a background. Most pattern papers will warp terribly when you paint over them, but not this! It took my gesso coat like a champ, and then it took a full out wet-paper-misting, crumpling, and crinkling. 

Another fun experiment was with the decorative tapes. I cut circle from a piece of paper and then striped the tape over the circle. Then I sanded the tapes a bit to give it the distressed quality of the rest of the page.

I also sanded the edges of the photo, the chipboard, and the alphabet stickers so that the distressed feel followed through every element of the page. 

I took the shot, above, just so you could get an idea of how durable this paper is. It takes a lickin' and keeps on stickin', that's for sure! 

And for my final bit for the month, I thought I'd show off one of those corners. It really was simple to get this effect. I sprayed the edges of the paper with water, enough to saturate it. Then I blotted the excess water with a paper towel (it's important to not rub, otherwise you could rub the pattern off the paper). While it's still wet, pull the paper inwards to crinkle it and crumble it to your desired consistency, and then let dry. Once it's dry, take an emery board or a piece of sandpaper and run it lightly over the creased spots. 

I adhered my background paper to a piece of solid cardstock, but you can choose to put it on another piece of patterned paper, if you like. I thought the plain black background suited this page better, though. 

Anyhow, just about everything I used on this page is available in the Flamingo Scraps store:

Carta Bella Well Traveled 12×12 Collection Kit

Carta Bella Well Traveled Chipboard Accents

Carta Bella Well Traveled Washi Tape

Thanks for checking out our blog, and be sure to check out Flamingo Scraps at flamingoscraps.com



Melissa