Snow Day Art Project

Is it just me? I buy cool things because I think it will make a cool art project, and then that cool thing just sits on a shelf and takes up space. This is a wood shelf that I bought at the dollar store over a year ago. I bought it not having a clue what I was going to do with it, but it had great "bones."

Yesterday it snowed and I stayed home from work. Time to make that wood shelf into art.

So I painted the shelf with my favorite acrylic paint--DecoArt Dazzling Metallics, Ellegant Finish, Espresso. It's basically brown with a nice shimmer. Then I lined the back of the shelf with some paper from GCD Studios.

I wanted the edges of the shelf to be really special, so I cut 1-inch wide strips out of some aluminum I had lying around (I guess at one time I thought it would make a cool art project), and used a Ten Seconds Studios kabuka mold in my Big Shot to emboss a really pretty design into the aluminum.

Because I wanted it to match the rest of the shelf perfectly, I painted the aluminum with the same DecoArt paint, and when it had dried, I sanded the top so that the silver would show through on the design. TIP: There is no need to paint the metal before you adhere it to the shelf. I had to repaint it after I had adhered it to the shelf with Humungo Killer Tape, due to the fact that I really burnished the metal onto the shelf. The process of burnishing also scrapes off tape. Lesson learned.

Anyway, in the end the edges turned out really good for a Snow Day Art Project!

The gears were cut out of some chipboard using a Sizzix Bigz die from the Tim Holtz Alterations collection. I wanted to try the Faux Tarnished Metal technique that my friend Shelly Hickox was kind enough to write a tutorial for. The only problem was that I appear to be out of clear UTEE. However, I have lots of bronze UTEE, so I used that. Somehow one of my gears even got pitted. Happy accident. That's distressing, baby.

So the gears might clue you in that I had a Steampunk theme in mind. My aforementioned friend Shelly recently did a tag of a Steampunk woman that was very cool, and I was going to do the same, BUT as I was looking at my stamp images, this kitty cat from Magenta caught my eye. I put a top hat on him from Oxford Impressions. Unfortunately, the hat was going the wrong way, so I stamped it with StazOn onto acetate and flipped it over.

And where did the feather in the hat come from? Well, you never know with a cat. Better to not ask questions.

And did you notice the monocle? If I were to do it again, I'd make it a little bigger, but I though it was a cute Steampunky touch. I bent some wire, set it over the cat's eye, and then filled the center with Crystal Effects glue.

I know that pieces of Art nowadays are supposed to say "Dream," "Create," or even "Hope." But I though "Meow" was much more appropriate. I printed it using a font called "Kelly" and put it in a Tim Holtz' Ornate Plate.

I wanted some more color, so I made some flowers out of Ten Seconds Studio art metal and these and these Spellbinders dies.

So here's my finished Snow Day Art Project piece. What do you think?

Cyndi