Happy 4th 0f July

 Ah ... today is truly a holiday.  Not only are we celebrating our country's independence, I got to go down and play in my craft room.  Both  reason's have brought their own kind of excitement to the day.  First, instead of red, white and blue fireworks, we are having God's fireworks ... a fairly intense thunderstorm with very bright lightning streaking across the sky.

It has rained ... and rained ... and rained.   I had a halfway start on collecting animals for the ark this afternoon, which is the other reason for excitement today.  As I was working in my craft room, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.  I was afraid it was a mouse.  It was bigger than a mouse and it went under my couch!  I opened the door to my outside patio and stepped back to wait.  In a few minutes, I saw a chipmunk scampering to the door.  It had made a little bit of a mess, but it could have been worse.  I'm still not sure how it got in my basement craft room!

So, now for today's project.  I tried my hand at a 3-dimensional Americana star.   I'm going to enter in Simon Says Stamp & Show Anything Goes Challenge.  I used Sizzix 5-Point 3-D Star Die.  You have to cut out five individual points of the star and then glue them together on tabs.  I cut mine out of an old Amazon.com shipping box.  I then painted them with Walnut Stain Distress Paint.  On top of that, I painted them with Fired Brick Crackle Paint. Once the crackle paint dried, I rubbed in Walnut Stain Distress Stain.  Finally I covered all the pieces with Ranger's Matte Multi-medium.   I glued the tabs together with Glossy Accents and paper clipped the tabs together while the tabs dried.

The background was made with more corrugated cardboard.  I cut out some strips of cardboard and ran them through my Vagabond with a woodgrain embossing folder (twice, once with the folder on each end of the strip).   Then I used Distress Ink in Black Soot, Walnut Stain, and Vintage Photo and Picket Fence Distress Stain to color the strips.  I pasted these strips on a larger piece of cardboard that had been colored with Walnut Stain and Vintage Photo Distress Stain.  I distressed the ends of the cardboard strips and put in some brads that looked like small nails or screws.  I colored the brads with some Ginger alcohol ink and used some Vintage Photo Stickles to give it a rusted look on and around the outside of the brads. 

I took some Time Holtz Core'dinations Kraft Core Paper and embossed it with two different Tim Holtz embossing folders (Stencil and Americana Background).  I used some sand paper to distress them and expose the kraft paper core underneath.  As you can see in the photo below, the damp weather bowed the cardboard somewhat.  It wasn't just the star that wanted to be 3-D today ... nothing wanted to lay flat on this project :)

Well, that's about it.  I hope it's been a good day for you all.  In spite of all the excitement, it has been a good one for me.

-- Mary Elizabeth