Good things come in small packages

Hi there and a big warm welcome to my new followers, its lovely to 'meet' you and hopefully I'll have returned the favour and joined your merry band of followers. If you don't have a link to your blog on your profile do leave me a link so I can stop by and say hi. Anyway back to business, its time for a new challenge over on the catwalk at Fashionable Stamping Challenges. This time I chose the theme which is 'Good things come in small packages' so we want to see you creating something small scale, anything from an ATC to a mini book or alter something small. Of course as we're a rubber stamping blog we want to see some stamping on your project. 

I'd planned on making some ATCs for this challenge but kind of got into shrink plastic mode and thought it would be perfect for this challenge. I'd had this project in my head for ages, since I saw some gorgeous 'Captured Fairy' projects at a craft fair. I wanted to create a captured mermaid and oh my goodness did it give me some grey hairs (ok then some more grey hairs lol)

Apologies for the dodgy photos this project was almost as tricky to photograph as it was to make lol. I took a little jar from the ginormous pile of 'stuff waiting to be altered' in my craft room and set too with the glue and flowersoft to create the sand at the bottom of the jar. I coloured the flowersoft with alcohol ink to make it a yellowy orange colour and added some shells from my stash to the bottom of the jar. I stamped the background and coloured it with distress markers, cut it out and stuck it on the outside of the jar with multimedium. Next I used a little stream and pearl alcohol inks to colour some of the glass and the reverse of the background. Next I made the little figures, both of which are quite large stamps (all the stamps used are from Chocolate Baroque), I stamped them with versafine ink, coloured with distress markers, cut them out and shrunk them with my heat gun. Here's a pic of them before they went in the jar

So far all was going smoothly the tricky bit was hanging the little mermaid and seadragon in the jar. Oh my, did I get in a stress lol. Anyway eventually I used invisible thread and made holes in the jar lid to thread them though, it took a bit of 'faffing' around to get them to hang properly but they behaved in the end lol. To cover the lid of the jar I made a little brayered sea, added some shells (real and shrink plastic), a little boat (this stamp is from the Stamp Man) and a little 'journey' key. I added some  pearl trim, some lacey sequin trim, and some blue green sea weedy fibres. I covered the edge of the lid with string. This was a bit of a performance as I used my hot glue gun and got in such a mess with stringy bits of glue everywhere. I popped some white netting under the lid and the job was done. Here's a pic of the lid

I'm entering my little 'Captured Mermaid' in the following challenges:

Cards and More: Maritime

Craft Garden : inspiration from water

Frilly and Funkie: Outdoors 

(my quote is 'Secrets of the Deep' but its at the back of the jar and doesn't show up at all on the pic)

Live and Love Crafts: Lovely lace and terrific trim

Try it on Tuesday: Travel

Thanks for popping by

Hope you're having a great weekend

Claire xx