Noel Wall Hanging

Here's one I've been working on for a little while - my first piece of wall art! I made this for the Twelve Tags of Christmas Funkie Junkie Style challenge and it is based on week #5's inspiration tag. I am also submitting it to Lessology Challenge #4: Wall Art.

Linda's inspiration tag for Week 5 appears below. The inspirations from her tag for my piece were the gold embossed lettering, the mix of elegance and homespun (burlap with gold, etc.) and the Perfect Distress technique used on the background.

I have a Noel stamp from Inkadinkado that is very similar to the Joy stamp Linda used on her tag. I stamped it on black and embossed in gold, then cut the letters apart using one for each panel. For my burlap piece I made a simple Christmas tree. I stamped flourishes, text and snowflakes on the background of each panel using Frayed Burlap Distress ink. I guess technically my technique isn't Perfect Distress because I used Gold Interference PearlEx powder instead of Perfect Pearls, but the effect is the same. Unfortunately you can't see a lot of the background. As usual, I managed to cover most of it up. You can see close-ups of each of the four panels at the end of this post.

The Lessology challenge has only been around a couple of months and this is my first submission. This challenge is for altered items and has a requirement of using at least one recycled/upcycled item in each creation. The theme for challenge 4 is wall art and I used two different recycled items. I cut the four background panels and the swirls around the snowflake/flower on the "L" panel from a cereal box. I painted it with antique white acrylic paint then did a little distressing with Frayed Burlap Distress Ink and some homemade glimmer spray.

The metal mat around the angel image and the center of the flower on the 'O' panel, the three little diamonds on the "E" panel and the center of the snowflake/flower on the 'L' panel are made from a soda can. I cut the can open, embossed it with my Tapestry Cuttlebug folder and colored it with Pitch Black Alcohol ink. I used a tiny flower die and a tiny square die from Spellbinders to cut the shapes, then I rubbed them with Antique Gold Rub-n-Buff. For the flower centers, I used my paper piercer to poke holes into the points of each petal. I love using jewelry findings for flower centers and decoration, but I don't have a lot of them and can't buy as many as I would like. I thought this might be a cool way to get a similar look and stretch the crafting dollars a little farther. I do like how they came out and am looking forward to trying some other ideas that I have with the soda cans.

Close ups of each of the four panels of the wall hanging appear below. This was a really fun project and I will definitely be making more wall art. Thanks for stopping by!