A grunge-filled weekend …

It was a wonderful grunge and chipboard-filled weekend at Scrap Tales with Wendy Vecchi! Lots of inking and techniques and visiting with friends and other Wendy fans. Saturday began with four hours of Ranger Distress Ink techniques followed by a four-and-a-half hour class where we used lots of inks and stamps to make all our own embellishments to decorate a mini chipboard album from Maya Road.

I tend to use the more earthy colors of Ranger Distress Inks — Old Paper, Vintage Photo, Walnut Stain and Black Soot — (see my work here) so I was looking forward to learning Wendy’s techniques for using the wide array of beautiful colors in the Distress Ink line. I have admired her work for several years, ever since I first seen her samples in the Ranger booth at CHA. I remember photographing her booth samples that year so I could study them once I got back home. Her style and use of color intrigue me – sort of Vintage but more contemporary.

In her Sunday class Wendy had us work with a Grungepaper book page to create an adorable wall hanging. We learned a masking technique using a Tim Holtz mask with Distress Inks then stamped over that with Wendy’s background and border stamps to add some texture and dimension. She had pre-stamped several of her other images on Grungepaper which we then cut out, inked and distressed to create our own embellishments for the piece. She taught us all how to make her Grungepaper rose using the Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher rather than glue and clips – that was pretty darn easy and they all looked so cute!

Then came the fun part – the assembly! We created our own title from Maya Road mini chipboard letters, added some Idea-ology filmstrip ribbon, foliage, mini paperclips and Distress Rock Candy Stickles. I also added some dangles to the filmstrip ribbon and some fabric scraps to the wire hanger. The butterflies still need to have antennae added before it will feel finished to me but it’s coming along. I titled the piece ‘make it fun’ to remind myself when I’m designing classes for my students that I make them as much fun as Wendy’s classes were for me this weekend!

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The Livingston Post is the only locally owned, all-digital information and opinion site in Livingston County, Mich. It was launched by award-winning journalists who were laid off from the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus by Gannett Co. Inc. in 2009.