Growing In Unity - Day One

Welcome one and all. I am super excited to be your GIU Gal for the week. I hope to bring you a mix of tutorials and ideas to spur your creativity, or maybe just be good for those long insomniac nights, to get you to sleep.

I've been sniffing the deeply etched red rubber for 2.5 years now and enjoy spending my time on the Unity Show and Tell group. If you haven't checked that out, be sure to. We're sorta like a secret clubhouse where we share our projects, oooo and awww over other's projects, ask for advice, enable, and generally let the sarcasm hang out. I've made some really great friends over there and would love to see you there too.

Today I bring you a tutorial on making a shaker embellishment of sorts. I say, "of sorts", because it's built into the base of my card, but it's not the main feature. I love the little house in May 2018's sentiment kit, With You I Am Home and thought a shaker sun would be a fun, cheerful addition to a little homestead scene.

I began by first making my sun, using the smallest scallop circle from Circle Scalloped. I used three colors of distress ink, misting with my water mister, then stamping.

I cut the center out with a circle die.

Next I added double sided adhesive to the backside and attached a piece of transparency.

I added foam tape all around the circle; you don't want any gaps or the shakey bits will get loose and make a mess, unless you're sending it to someone you don't like and want them to have a mess, then go right ahead and leave that gap (also works to send to Whitney when she talks down about her crafting abilities). Also add the foam tape to the rest of the page, so it's nice and even, without a pronounced slope. Foam tape is important because you need to leave space for the shakey bits to shake, not just sit there, squished like lady bits in a mammogram machine.

Fill with shakey bits of your choosing. I chose seed beads, glitter and sequins. Pull off all of the tape backing and afix the back piece, thus trapping all of the shakey bits, unless you left that gap.

For this project, I decided that I should add a sky, after I had already assembled the shaker bit, because grand ideas, after the fact, is how I roll. I simple made masks of my sun and house, added some distress ink to Dot Face (Dot Fade), spritzed with water, and stamped on to the background.

Paint, add embellishments and there you go. I used the clouds from Sending Up Something Beautiful.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to add a shaker pop to your project. Remember to comment for a chance to win a random grab bag of 25 deeply etched red rubber stamps to sniff, I mean add to your collection, I'll be choosing two of you, or rather Random.org will be.