Spring is in the Air (by Doreen)

Hello everyone, it is the turn of our Guest Design Team member Doreen Sympson to share some projects to inspire you throughout the month. Her first blog post features a lovely decorated cheese board. There are lots of different MDF shapes available on the market, and perhaps Doreen's project will give you lots of ideas for creating projects for your own home.

Doreen writes:

With buds appearing somewhat prematurely on my Honeysuckle I thought to myself poor thing must think 'Spring is in the Air', how confusing the mild weather we have been experiencing is to our poor gardens. So this cheese board is the product of those thoughts.

Products used were as follows;

Chocolate Baroque Spring is in the Air stamp set
Chocolate Baroque Tissue Paper
Black Stazon inkpad
Chalk/ acrylic paints
Deco Art one step crackle
Brush on gloss glaze
White gesso
MDF cheese board

1. Paint board with gesso and put to one side to dry.
2. Take tissue, stamps and Stazon inkpad and stamp images desired.
3. Using water and a fine paintbrush dampen around the images and tear them away to separate the images.
4. Using the chalk or acrylic paints randomly paint the board.
5. To adhere the images to the board once the paint has dried I used a thin coat of one step crackle.
6. Wait for this to dry then colour images use a fine brush with chalk paints.
7. I used a cream colour for the snowdrops and to add a little highlight to some of the other images.

Finally I used a scrap of linen textured card from my odd bits of cut offs and used a fine liner permanent pen to write the words, cut these up, and went round the edges with either a chisel tipped permanent marker or black inkpad. Dry brush using the bronze to tie in with the earthy grounding of the images.

A few photos at various stages of the project.

Randomly add paint.

A close up image of the texture, the thin layer of crackle glaze, which I think adds to the earthy look at the base of the images.

 Thank you for looking

Love Doreen