AECP 2 - Final Challenge Part 2

Hi Crafty Peeps - welcome to Part 2 of my AECP Level 2 Final Challenge post. You can read Part 1 here. 

As a reminder, the first part of the final challenge was to create four masculine cards for various occasions throughout the year and this is the second part - to repurpose/recycle or alter.

Upcycled/Repurposed Item

Our house is full of potential repurposing things and I often repurpose boxes into pretty gift boxes, particularly at Christmas as it is always wonderful to give and receive a beautifully presented gift, don’t you think? But I chose to recycle the case of an old, much-loved but damaged CD.

This is a desk calendar – ‘A Year of Flowers’ – and it sits in the CD case beautifully.

My first challenge was to set up the pages so that I could print the calendar month and a motivational/ thoughtful/funny quotation on each page. I use MS Publisher when need to lay out a page accurately – I find it works better than Word. 

I measured the inside of the CD lid, which came to 12 cm x 14 cm, so I wanted my pages to be 11.8 cm x 13.8 cm, so that I had a little wriggle room when sliding them in and out of the lid. In order not to waste paper, I set up two calendar pages on one sheet of paper and made sure that I was consistent with placement, headings, fonts, etc., throughout. 

You can see how the pages were set out in this screenshot.

Once I was happy I printed the pages onto Make It Colour card – it is so smooth and I love how it takes ink and markers and pencils.

In order to deliver a year of flowers, Mr Google and I worked at finding a list of birth month flowers and came up with the following (plus a note of the stamp sets and stencils used for each page):

January - carnation and snowdrop (Pen Sketched Flowers and Narrow Brick Stencil)

February - violet and primrose (Build-a-Flower: Sweet Violet and MFT Wavy Lines Stencil)

March - daffodils and jonquils (Paint-a-Flower: Daffodil and Deco Wallpaper Stencil)

April - daisy and sweet pea (Spring Daisy and Fine Tulle Stencil)

May - lily of the valley and hawthorn (Fairy Tale Florals and Fine Tulle Stencil)

June - rose and honeysuckle (Enchanted Roses and Grid Stencil)

July - larkspur and waterlily (Build-a-Flower: Cattleya and Fine Tulle Stencil)

August - gladiolus and poppy (Airbrushed Flowers and Deco Wallpaper Stencil)

September - aster and morning glory (Build-a-Flower: Aster and Grid Stencil)

October - marigold and cosmos (Stunning Cosmos and Narrow Brick Stencil)

November - chrystanthemum (New Beginnings and Narrow Brick Stencil)

December - narcissus and holly (Build-a-Flower: Poinsettia and Mighty Corners Stencil)

I had some of these flower stamps already and some that could masquerade as others, so I pulled them all out of my stash and got to work. December didn't get her holly, tho!

I also chose several of my stencils, as I knew I would need them for background interest. I tried to choose quite geometric patterns as a foil to the softness and prettiness of the flowers, as I didn’t want the pages to look too fussy. I also pulled out my roll of Judikins masking paper, as I could tell there was lots of masking ahead! And I think this shows my dedication to fussy cutting!

I cut an oblong mask to mask the calendar part of the page, as I didn’t want any colour over this. Then I stamped around the page, masking where necessary, and masking everything before stencilling the background. 

Once done, I added colour to the flowers in a combination of layers of the layering stamp, Copic markers and coloured pencils.

There’s a little photo-story below of making one of the pages, so that you can see my process:

• mask the month
• stamp and mask the flowers
• stencil over masked page
• remove stencil and all masks to reveal finished page.

Tip:

Even if you are using a layering stamp set, you can add extra depth and detail with your favourite colouring medium. I used Prismacolor pencils over some of my final images to strengthen the shadows or deepen a colour I felt was a little too light. You can see the difference this has made in the Sweet Violet images - check the page above then see the page below, where I have used coloured pencils to add further depth and colour to the stamped image.

And here are the final calendar pages.

As you can see, the calendar sits really well on its own and as each month passes the front card moves to the back and a new month is revealed. 

Thank you for your time in reading this long post. I hope you have found it interesting and that you might even have a go at repurposing a CD case yourelf.

As always, a list of all the products I have used (where still available) is below.

 Until next time, keep crafting.

Supplies:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and if you follow them and make a purchase I might receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This helps to support my blog.