Curiously Frayed...

Gooooodly Morning to all you lovely Compendium-ers!  Today sees the start of another brand new Compendium of Curiosities 3 Challenge.  To see all the details on how to join in with the challenge, CLICK HERE.  Also, if you pop across to Linda's blog, you will see all gorgeous creations that my talented teamies on the Curiosity Crew have made... they never cease to amaze me with their inspirational ideas and art!   The challenge is sponsored by the Inspiration Imporium this time... so you will have a chance of winning a very generous Gift Certificate to spend there.  Tim & Mario have, as ever, very kindly donated goodies for an extra prize... which will be awarded to the "Curiosity Crew's Choice"... so you have two chances of winning fabby prizes!  If you haven't got your Compendium book just yet, you can order a signed copy directly from the man himself... HERE.  And... Linda has also done a FAQ page for you.. HERE it is... all the info you will need is listed there.   This week we are turning to Page 66 of the book and doing the Frayed Fabric technique using Tim's gorgeous Eclectic Elements fabric.  As ever with the Compendium Challenge, neither I, nor the Curiosity Crew, will be posting the technique instructions and participants must not do so either. We all want to encourage people to buy Tim's awesome book; giving away the instructions wouldn’t be fair to him. Linda will have no choice but to un-link any entries that don’t follow this rule.  

Before I waffle on I shall say a very Happy New Year to you all and wish you all the very best for 2015... let's hope it brings all our dreams come true! 

My entry for this weeks' challenge is another tag to add to the collection.  Now, for those who have read my blog for a while, you may have got the gist that I am not a sewist... nope, I struggle to thread the machine, let alone get a stitch out of it.  Grim bought me a little diddy machine a few years ago and that did ok until it ran out of thread and yep, I struggled to get more thread into it.  I am that thick... really!   I knew that I was going to have to do something about this not being a sewist issue... so I hatched a cunning plan.  A plan so cunning that Jock McCunning from Sneakyville would be amazed by it.   What did I do?  I collected together all the ingredients needed for my tag and popped next door to see my lovely neighbour Carol, who is an expert sewist and asked her to... um... help do it for me.  *insert gasps of shock*  I know, I kind of cheated... ok, I really cheated but in my defence, I happen to like Carol muchly and should she have allowed me loose on her beautiful sewing machine, I would have broken it... so better safe than sorry and all that.... ahem.... and I did do all the decorating bits meself...

Anyways, the decorations:  I popped some of the Eclectic Elements fabric (apparently I had a fat quarter, whatever that may be... it was indeedily gorgeous but not that fat...) onto a piece of black Clearly For Art using Glue & Seal and once this had dried, I used Tim's Mini Tattered Florals Movers & Shapers die to cut out a few spikey flowers, the Heart M&S die to cut the... um... heart and a few leaves from the Mini Tattered Leaves die.   In order to see the diecuts, I firstly dulled the print of the fabric on the heart using a smidge of Antique Linen Distress Paint, secondly spritzed the flowers with Wild Honey and Broken China Distress Spray Stains and thirdly, inked the leaves with Forest Moss Distress Ink.  Hey, the fabric takes Distress sooo well! Result!  I used my Scratchy Tool to fray the edges of the shapes to make them a bit shabby and then heated the CFA from behind to shape them.

Last year I treated myself to something I have been longing to own for a very long time... an old Underwood typewriter!  I had been a-mooching around eBay one Sunday evening and spotted a portable Underwood on a listing that was just about to end and it was dirt cheap... so I snuck in and popped a bid in at 4 seconds to go.. and won it!  Hurrah!  Now I have got the Room of Stash nice and tidy, I have finally got room for it to be used...  high time I got typing!  One of my all time fave songs is P.S. I Love You by The Beatles and this song has been floating around my head for a few days... so it seemed right to type the words and pop them onto my tag.   Oh and do you see the little harlequin stamp made an appearance too?  Well, it has to be used for continuity... and cos I loves it muchly of course.

Don't forget, you have two whole weeks to enter the challenge... and a bat at the chance of grabbing the Crew's Choice prize which is a mahooosive haul of stash donated personally by Tim & Mario... so if you are joining in, remember to comment on all the Crew's blogs and you will be in with a chance of winning that too *believe me, this is one gigantic pile of goodies*!  Wishing you all a very crafty 2015.. may your fingers be forever inky :O))   Thanks for looking, have an inspirational day!  TTFN

Hels x