Recycle, Re-Purpose & Re-Invent challenge

I decided to try my hand at the bonus round for the Recycle, Re-Purpose & Re-Invent Challenge hosted by CS Designs. The theme for this round is "A Plastic Existence" and the challenge is to take something plastic that I would normally discard and use it in my art.

Even though we use cloth bags a lot, we still seem to have a  large number of plastic bags finding their way into our house. It might be some kind of magic...I'm just not sure. Anyway, I decided to alcohol ink (stream, silver, and lettuce) a white plastic bag and use it for the iris folded background on this greeting card. The only tricky bit was cutting it in fairly straight 1" strips. I actually stapled it to computer paper (a recycled piece :) ) which I had pre-lined. That made it easy to cut. The above photo is a closer view of the plastic bag layers.

To me the square looked like a watery background so I used a CS Designs digi stamp called Loreley Stars and Fish which I coloured with my Prismacolor pencils. Because I wanted the digi to be the focal for the card, I double matted it and popped it up on two layers of foam tape. Then to continue the theme, I Glimmer Misted  some leftover cheesecloth (from pickle-making) to look like netting . I added some shell charms, paper sand dollars, and pearls.

I printed a CS Designs sentiment which I love and mounted it on the same turquoise cardstock as I used for the stamp. To pull the silver in from the charms and the iris folded square, I added two tiny brads to the sentiment label. I love the detail on this stamp and the seaside colour palette. This has been a fun challenge!

Thanks for taking a peek!
Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie