Eclectic Ellapu ~ It's Good to Be Queen

Yahoo...it's my turn to host the challenge for Eclectic Ellapu and it's the Purple Team up to bat. The theme that I have chosen for the challenge is to add a tag to your project ...or your project could be a tag. I decided to alter a large wooden crown from the Dollar store. It is 15" at the widest point and 11.5' at the tallest. It's going to become a door crown (no pun intended) which means that it will hang between the top of the door and the ceiling in my art room. As soon as I saw the bare wood crown I knew what expression I would include. It's one of my favourites from Mary Engelbreit: It's good to be Queen.

I started the process by painting the crown with black gesso. I traced the outside shape on newsprint and then measured in 3/8" to get the inside shape. This was taped to some corrugated cardboard and the smaller crown was cut out and then peeled to expose the corrugation. The now bumpy cardboard was brushed with white gesso and then Picked Raspberry Distress ink to highlight the corrugation and add interest. Black embossing Paste from Studio 490 was spread through the TCW Harlequin stencil for added texture, although most of it ended up being covered.

The queen image is one of my favourite digis from Deidre Mosher Designs. I love her stamps. Queenie was coloured with Prismacolor pencils, given gold gel pen dots, and fussy cut leaving a narrow white border. Flat black pearls were added to her crown and scepter. A Martha Stewart doily was spritzed with Dylusions Pink Bubblegum spray ink and then stamped with a script stamp using Memento Tuxedo Black ink. This was glued behind her royal head.

The background was layered with two playing cards portraying queens. On top of that was adhered a torn piece of DCWV Collage art paper which had been stencilled with the TCW Mini Punchinella template using Picked Raspberry. Two Darkroom Door stamps (Top Secret and Evidence) plus a chevron stamp from 7 Gypsies were scattered around the edges. A scrap from a die cut leftover was adhered under the top secret stamp with another piece attached to the right edge of the crown.

The tag was cut from another scrap from the DCWV paper, inked around the edges with Picked Raspberry, and stencilled with gesso through the Dylusions Dotted Flower template. An Idea-ology book plate was afixed to the tag with brads and letter stickers spelling Royal were placed inside the opening. Stamping was done at the top and bottom of the tag with one of the Regal Flourish stamps from Tim Holtz. More number stickers indicated 100% (ROYAL). To complete the tag, crinkled seam binding was adhered to the top and part of a black zipper was glued to the right side before the tag was layered over the yellow background scrap.

A length of gold K& Company border was adhered over the cardboard and the tag but under Queenie. I love her fancy shoes so I had to make sure they showed. The lettering is a mix of Idea-ology alphas and Scrabble tiles. A die cut key was added the left side and a crown charm to the right side of the project. The circles at the top of the crown were given huge rhinestones for four of the points and a rhinestone and metal flower charm for the middle one.

This crown makes me smile in part because it was fun to make, partly because I like how it turned out, and mostly because of the humour in the phrase. I am not the queen of anything, not even my art room where my cat, Molly, rules. Ann Estelle, Mary Engelbreit's character, is Queen of Quite-A-Lot. I wonder if there's room for two :) Thanks for stopping by today. Be sure to pop over to the Eclectic Ellapu blog to see how the other Purplies responded to this challenge. They are awesome! I hope you'll join the fun. There's a DT call going on over there right now. Check it out, too. It's a great group.

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie