Crafter’s Workshop + Balzer designs blog hop | stars & circles stencil

I’m honored to be a part of this Blog Hop featuring one of my FAVORITE of Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s stencils. Stars & Circles is the perfect accent, finishing touch, or as a background to my project. On cards, tags, layouts, or canvases, it is my most used stencil so far in 2012! I have and love the 6″ version, but it is also available in a 12″ size.

So, what to make for this blog hop? I decided first and foremost just to play. Mess around. See what turns up. Above you see my stencil (it used to be white… now it’s gold + green mostly). Also there you see some tags – the purple one has a water + gold paint wash experiment… just things I was playing with…

Lets talk about water + stencil with Dylusions sprays. First you give a good healthy coat of mist onto the tag, then let it dry. Once it’s DRY, place stencil over and mist with water.

Here’s what it will look like (below) – now this is a fun thing to play with as the amount of water will affect how much of a faux-bleached look you get.

See how it bleaches out the color where the water was? this is fun to try and another fun way to get stencils worked into my projects.

Know what else I love? Using paints with the stencils as a background or as an accent at the edge of my paper, with mists, soooo many possibilities. One of my faves though is using multi-medium or gel medium in glossy and creating a resist.

Just place stencil over paper, spread (think peanut butter…) your medium, then set it to dry. I love doing this. I just think the process is fun and I could do it all day.

Here’s my layout finished – you can see how the stars & circles stencil really added a lot to my background. When I was ready I just misted generously over the background paper then wiped away excess. No worries about perfect- just fun stuff.

I went with red white and blue for this layout – but I love this stencil in gold, green, and really all colors. I was just feeling some Memorial Day patriotic mojo I guess!

Love how this turned out – and how the stencil really makes my background. Now, I have to put some of my scraps and experiments to use…

The background is misted, the blue strips are from a paper that I had been playing with both stamping my stencil and paint with it in another way that didn’t quite look right… but cut apart I’m loving the look. Here’s a patriotic card…

The center star has some crackle accents applied to it (hence the shine).  Simple! I’ve been loving to use my scraps to assemble cards like this.

Links to supplies used:

I hope you’ve enjoyed checking out my creative play. So what is next? Go check out other crafters who have been using this same stencil and are taking part in today’s hop:

Julie Fei-Fan Balzer http://balzerdesigns.typepad.com/balzer_designs/2012/05/stencil-hop-stars-circles.html

Diana Trout http://dianatrout.typepad.com/blog/

Karen Grunberg http://www.karenika.com/archives/23569

Christine Urias http://scraptime.ca/blogpage/?p=5276

Ali Edwards http://aliedwards.com/?p=22240

Alisa Burke http://alisaburke.blogspot.com/

 

---

Looking for stencils on-line? I buy most of mine from Blue Moon Scrapbooking – they’ve got a lot. Including Julie’s latest designs!