Saturday 19 December 2015

Secret Santa Door Hanger

I was so pleased when I picked the name of the Head of English out of the bag for the Secret Santa at work.  I knew immediately what I wanted to make for her gift.  Every day at our middle school we Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) for 15 minutes at the start of one lesson, so the theme of the door hanger was an easy one to come up with.




I decided to make one side of the hanger mostly monochrome to represent life without books.  The other rainbow bright side represents a world filled with stories and escape.
The base hanger came in a pack of two chipboard hangers that I picked up at a sale.  I gave it a double coat of gesso to seal it, then added two coats of Pearl Shimmer Paint by Cosmic Shimmer.  I was initially planning to do all the black stamping with Versafine ink and heat emboss using detail clear powder, but I found that a little hit and miss so I switched to Archival ink instead.
I used Twinkling H2Os by Luminarte to paint the 'Curiosity' from the Tim Holtz Perspective collection by Stamper's Anonymous.  All the remaining stamps come from the Bookworm set (DDRS139) by Darkroom Door.  
On the reverse side, I decided on the theme of the rainbow and carefully chose the 'Go Away!' and 'Readers at work!' as they are multiples of 7 characters and therefore would fit with the rainbow theme.  It was a happy coincidence that the stack of books that I wanted to use also fitted perfectly!  
The Archival ink colours that I used were: Vermilion, Monarch Orange, Saffron, Emerald Green, Manganese Blue, Aquamarine and Deep Purple.  To ink up the book stack, I simply started at the top with Vermilion, rubbed the ink off the stamp where I didn't want it and worked my way down the stack using the next colour each time.  The third generation print behind the quote on the monochrome side of the hanger came about as I was stamping onto copy paper to clean the stamp.  
I decided to have a hint of colour behind the quote, to hint at the colour that books can bring into our lives.  I was really please with the final product and so was the recipient of the gift.
 

No comments: