Burning Paper Bags! FIRE!

So there I was. Burning bits of paper bags in my basement. No, I'm not crazy, I just had an idea and had to try it. Do you ever have something in your crafting room that has been sitting there for years without being used? For me, it was a stack of brown paper bags that I promised myself over and over again I would do something with. 

Today was the day. 

The challenge over at the Mixed Media Card Challenge blog is "vintage". Those paper bags seemed like the perfect medium to create a vintage feel. I didn't start with fire, actually, I started by scraping some crackling embossing paste over a paper bag and letting it air dry. Once dry, I sponged it with some Weathered Wood Distress Inks to create a background sheet. 

 

Honestly, I think this would make a great effect for a Halloween card... Maybe next week? It's perfect for this card, though, because it gives it that vintagey peeling paint effect.

I decided to play along in the Fusion Hardwood Floral Challenge, because they had a great inspirational image this week and in Create Something Crafty's One Card, One Stamp Set challenge.
Luckily, I have STAMPlorations's Bloom Sketches stamp set, which matches the Fusion image perfectly!

I was really inspired by the daisies on Deepti's card. She created this GORGEOUS watercolor effect. Go check it out! To try to achieve similar results, I embossed some of the daisies in an opaque white powder on a piece of paper bag. 

 Then I painted them with Twinkling H20s. The finished daisies were really lovely because the paper bag peeked through and created a more delicate almost petal-like effect. I also created another panel by embossing some of the other flowers from the same stamp set and painting them with blue H20s. 

To create a more vintage feel, I brought on the fire! I burned one edge of the panel (and set off the fire alarm - woops!). I Xacto knifed some places for the daisy to stick into the blue flowers and then I put it all together with some twine and ribbon. 

I can say that this was definitely a process and I didn't know if it would all come together in the end but it finally did! And I used those stinkin' brown bags in three different, but equally gorgeous ways!

I'm also going to enter this into the STAMPlorations Anything Goes never-ending challenge. STAMPlorations has some great challenges where you can use any kind of stamps that you want, but this particular challenge is for the crafters who want to ink up STAMPlorations stamps. For every 50 entries they get, they will be giving away free prizes.

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