Life is Pretty Amazing...

This small needled felted piece was started a couple of years ago as a felted bit that I really had no plans for.  I was just playing with my embellisher and some rovings one day.  Then, probably a year after that I needed a bit of felt for a 'mystery' hand stitching activity that we were going to be doing at a meeting while I still belonged to the Oakville Stitchery Guild.  It turns out that we were making arm cuffs, but mine never actually made it to the cuff stage.  Instead I finished it off as just a little piece of fibre art.  I had plans to mount it to a quilted background or some such thing, but it just never happened.

Finally, in my GOE group, it was Tracey's turn to present us with our next quarterly challenge.  Her idea was to have us finish a UFO (unfinished object for those of you that might not know the acronym) without spending any more money on it.

Well, which UFO to work on...I have plenty to choose from...

I decided that I'd try to finish up all of the UFOs I have in various stages of completeness (or incompleteness for you pessimists out there!).  This piece is the first one I've managed to finish up...and, I've also started three new fibre art pieces (not to mention journalling and photography 'stuff' LOL).  Can you say "attention deficit"?

So back to this piece...I started by painting some plain copy paper with various layers of acrylic paint.

 I then painted an 8" X 10" canvas, tore the painted paper to get a rough, uneven edge, and used matte medium to adhere the paper to the painted canvas.  This took a bit of time because of drying time (thus the new projects that I was able to start LOL).  That got some more paint added to it using an old gift card and more wait time...

I then used a scrap of tissue paper and wrote, "When you stop and look around, life is pretty amazing."  A little bit of positive self-talk to keep me focussed on how lucky I really am!  And really, I am!

The tissue paper was adhered using more matte medium and when dry, I used a Pitt pen to trace over the lettering and fill it out.

 

After letting that dry overnight, I used a white Sakura Jelly Roll pen to add some highlights to the lettering.  This is something I just figured out this week.  I'd often have trouble with the white pen giving me a really nice, consistent line, even though a gave the black a few minutes to dry before trying to write over top of it.  Since waiting overnight, it works like a charm for me!  Who knew!

The final step was to adhere the needle felted piece to the canvas, you guessed it, with more matte medium.