Birthstone Challenge

Hello!  Thank you for your visit and Happy New Year!  My great-grandmother in all her wisdom said that how you spend the first day of the new year is how the rest of the year will go.  So I always choose to spend this day doing what I love.  Crafting!

I am really excited to share that I am part of the design team for a new challenge blog - Birthstone Challenges.  This is a really cool idea! The challenges will run for 6 weeks, this one starts today and ends February 15th at 4pm MT.  The colors - January is Garnet is my Grandma's birthstone and February is Amethyst.  Challenges are always Anything Goes but you need to feature one or both of these colors.

I have always wanted to art journaling.  I've been watching Vicky Papaioannou's videos for years now.  This challenge made me finally take that plunge.

As I said, my Grandma's birthstone is Garnet and our heritage is Spanish so this page was so fitting!  I started with die cutting a tag using the Crafty Kit from Tonic Studios.  These dies are big.  The base is about 7 inches long.  The layering piece is from multi-media paper I got from Michaels.  I first used crackling mousse in black with a stencil I got from Simon Says Stamp.  I applied only a thin layer because I didn't want a lot of crackling.  Once that dried I added some ink.  I even inked a couple of edges with purple to pull in a little of the Amethyst color.  Then I decorated the page using Desire emphemera from Stamperia. 

I hope my page inspires you to try something different and that you'll join us in the challenge!