Funtastic Friday - Stampbord Notebook

Hello and thank you for the lovely comments that are being left on my blog!  They are much appreciated.

Now, on Wednesday I said that I had something new to play with and I have been doing just that.  I received lots of lovely stampbord that I had ordered and have had a bit of a play. 
If you are unsure of what it is (and I only heard about it recently) it is a hard board surface covered in layers of finely compacted clay that provide a really smooth surface ideal for taking all sorts of mediums.  But the really cool thing is that you can also scratch back layers of the clay once you have coloured to create a really different sort of effect. 
There are some great projects and more info about it over at Projects4Crafters, which is a blog by Fiona who I saw demonstrating this product on the television, so please click on the link if you want to find out more.

I am going to enter the project that I made into the following challenges...

* Creative Carte Blanche - Anything Goes but include something you haven't done before
* Crafty Girls Creations - Challenge 14 Anything Goes
* Creative Artiste Challenge Blog - Anything Goes Mixed Media

So to begin here is a photo of the main items that I used...

I took the notebook apart to be able to decorate properly and the stampbord pieces are 2" square and 1" square.

I wanted to dive straight in with the stampbord so started by decorating the bigger square...

 I inked up the board using meadow, stream and gold alcohol inks.  Then stamped and heat embossed parts of a border stamp from Bee Crafty.

 I used the finest blade in the set of scraper tools that I had got with my kit to scrape back some of the colour to add highlights to the design.  I could then have coloured those in another colour but I wanted the contrast between the black and the white.

Then I found a sentiment stamp from Cardio that fit perfectly in the square and used that with embossing powder again and added some more highlights.  The edges were then finished off with a gold gilding pen.

I then decorated the smaller square in the same way, using some small flower stamps from Cardio but just with archival black ink rather than embossing...

Once these were completed I decorated the notebook covers by coating them with mowed lawn distress ink straight from the pad.  I didn't use anything to cover the wood first as I quite liked the effect from the wood grain under the ink.  I then sprayed the covers with Prima Bloom gold foil ink.  Once I had dried these off with my heat tool I used a matt varnish to seal it as it is a notebook and will be handled.  After that I used the same stamp again to tie the cover in with the decoration...

 The notebook was then put back together again and glue gel used to make sure it all stuck firmly.  To create a similar effect to the stampbord I used a white posca pen to add some dot details and finished it all off with gold gilding pen around the edges...

I hope you enjoyed my first outing with stampbord, I think it may be making a few appearances especially in my mixed media pieces.  Tomorrow me, my daughter and her friend are going to have a go at playing with it to maybe make a necklace each (so there maybe a sneaky quick post at the weekend if it goes to plan!!). 

Thank you for reading and have a lovely weekend whatever you decide to do,

Jane x