J for Jenna

I recently visited our local branch of The Range to buy some ribbon to finish off a crochet project I had been working on, and while I was there I spotted a whole shelf of these brown board letters. They had obviously only just come in because they were all in good condition and hadn't been knocked about and battered and              
as soon as I saw this J I thought of my little baby great granddaughter. She is almost 11 weeks old now and can be coaxed into smiling at us.

To start with I gave it a couple of coats of gesso and while it dried
I stamped the little angel images onto tissue paper with  black Archival ink and coloured them very lightly with pink coloursoft pencils. I haven't got any pale pink paint so I mixed a tiny amount of Fresco Finish Rusty Rose with quite a lot of white to get the shade I wanted and used it to paint the sides. Next I painted the front and back white and then stamped some flourishes with the pink paint. I used an Adirondak Willow paint dabber to add some colour through a piece of sequin waste, and stamped some bits of a music stamp for more background interest. I tore out the parts of the angel images that I wanted and glued them on with matte multi medium. When all was dry I gave it a thin wash of watered down gesso. I used a Krylon gold pen on all the edges. The chipboard letters to spell her name were painted with a gold paint but I thought they looked a bit dull so I used Versamark ink and clear embossing powder to give them a nice gloss finish which doesn't really show in my photo. I gave it all two coats of craft varnish for protection and finished with a ribbon bow and some paper flowers coloured to match. All the stamps I used on this are from Crafty Individuals.  Jenna isn't really old enough to appreciate this but her mum liked it.

I am going to enter this at Make It Monday - Anything Goes.

Thank you for taking a look and for your lovely comments. Jean