Mo's Digital Pencil - Project of the Month Blog Hop!

Woooooo, my very first blog hop and I'm delighted and honoured that it is as a member of Mo's Dream Team!  If you've arrived here from Rosette's blog, then you're on the right track.  If not, why not hop over to Cheryl's and start from the beginning.

This month's theme is buttons, which I love and adore but don't always have the occasion to use.  So I went a bit overboard and got all buttoned out!

Image: Mo's Digital Pencil, 'Mummu and Virginia' (see below)

Papers:  Bo Bunny (brown frame); Docrafts 'V&A Collection' ('wallpaper'); SEI (sofa); DCWV 'Linen Closet' (rug).

Other: Buttons from stash and a bit of knitting done especially for this project by a not-very-skilled knitter (me, of course!).

I used Mo's wonderful Mummu and Virginia for this project, which you can purchase from Mo's Digital Pencil store, here. I love Mummu, in all her guises, but this particular image evokes very lovely memories for me.  You'll find more details about this project below so I hope you'll come back and take a look.

But, if you're anxious to hop, please visit Lori's blog to see what wonderfulness she has come up with!

So, ready for the details?

I wanted to make something other than a card for the hop and this image is almost photograph-like, catching a quiet moment between the two of them.  So I thought I'd turn it into a picture. It's a real shame that my photography skills are so lacking - in real life, this is beautifully three-dimensional.

This is the closest I've ever come to decoupage - the top image is separate from the bottom and is raised slightly by the heavy paper-piecing on the sofa.

This is what the bottom layer looked like when I started:

You will see that I've paper-pieced the sofa in green velour paper from SEI, each separate piece of the sofa being a separately cut piece of paper, to give that real 'joined together' look, instead of just a flat piece of paper.  I added some shading by chalking the edges with dark moss green and using my Copics to suggest the pleating around the bottom. I coloured around the edges of Mummu and Virginia with a dark tone of the final colour, to give some depth behind the top layer.

I'm sure Mummu would have a rug to put her feet on, so this one was paper-pieced again, with an embossed DCWV 'Linen Closet' paper, and shadowed around the edges with chalk.

Then I coloured and cut out the top layer:

As you can see, I've completed the colouring and then cut so close around the image that there is no free white paper to deal with at all.  Here, Mummu and Virginia are 'free-standing' against a white background so I could photograph them.

As Mummu is knitting, I thought I'd join her.  How funny was that?!  I can't knit to save my life and with my clumsy fingers it was hilarious to all watching.  But I managed to knit enough for this project and now my needles will reside at the back of the craft cupboard for ever more. 

I covered the frame with the knitted length, scoring the frame first to ensure a good key for the PVA glue I used. 

Next, buttons, which were sewn on through the top layer of the knitting, and to finish, some pearl-headed hat pins.

All I had to do then was carefully mount the top image on the bottom one.  I didn't need to use dimensional pads as the heavy paper-piecing on the sofa acted as a spacer between the background paper and the top image.  I used just a few small glue dots to hold Mummu and Virginia in place.

When I was a girl, I used to love rummaging through my grandma's box of buttons - it was like treasure.  That's why this project is so dear to me - it reminds me of my grandma, who would sit by the (gas) fire, knitting.  She's no longer here and I miss our time together. 

It also reminds me of my lovely mother-in-law who, when she first met me, tried to teach me to crochet, with disastrous results!!

This one might actually go on the wall!

In case you stopped to read, here's the link to Lori's again, so that you can hop over to visit her. 

Thank you for visiting - enjoy the hop!

Happy crafting.
xx