My Union Jack Cushion Cover

Ages ago I was watching Lorraine whilst having my breakfast and they did a whole segment on home furnishings featuring Union Jacks.  In the middle of all of the £60 teapots and £50 cushions there was a picture of a cushion cover from the Pound Shop.  It just seemed so out of place in amongst everything else it sort of made me take notice.

So fast forward a few weeks and I was in a local Pound Shop and found the cushion covers.  They had ordinary plain printed Union Jacks and then they had the swirly ones.  of course the artist in me made me buy *every* swirly one they had.  Luckily for my purse they only had 3!!!

Then a few weeks after that me and my Mam were in Marks and Spencer and saw *the* most fabulous Union Jack cushion for £25.  It was all done in sequins and my suggested that she could stitch some sequins randomly onto my cover.  So thats exactly what she did.

And here is my *gorgeous* cushion and all for the princely sum of £4.49 including the cushion pad and sequins!!  The bed spread behind it on my rocking chair is one that was on my Mams bed before she got married.  It was all hand embroidered by my Gran.  She was one amazingly clever lady!

Journal Journeys Challenge 12

Oooh look at me - 6th of the month and I'm already entering the challenge.  Makes a refreshing change!

I've had a few comments thanking me for tutorials.  Tutorials weren't my intention.  I intended to put all of the details in purely to remind myself of how I did something and why.  I'm so pleased that helps other people too!

Dawn over on Journal Journeys gave us the challenge on 'friendship' this month.  Its a special month as its the twelfth challenge Dawn has given us and she will enter everyone who posts a picture of their entry on her blog via linky a chance to win some blog candy!!

I searched the internet again for some inspiration and I found a quote that says everything that I know makes a friendship a great one.  I wanted to get this feeling over on the page so I wanted it to be quiet and not at all busy.  This'll all make sense when you see the finished page.

I started off by gessoing the page to cover up the ink from last months challenge that bled through.  I'm a messy journaler ;)  I started off by blending Shaded Lilac DI onto the page but it was a bit too pale for what I wanted.  So I used Picked Raspberry DI (a yummy berry pink colour if you've not got it) around the edge of one page and Dusty Concord around the other.  As I continued to blend I noticed that there was a heart appearing on the page where I'd left Shaded Lilac.  Its must've been serendipity cos it works perfectly on the page.

I outlined the heart using a Signo uni-ball in black. It mustn't have like working over the gesso and ink cos the ink only flowed intermittently.  It just makes it look even more hand drawn.  I also drew a couple of lines down each edge of the pages too.

I copied the quote into Word and changed the font to Kristen ITC and made it much bigger and printed it off in grey.  I made sure there was plenty of space between each word so I could cut them out.  I stuck the words to the page and drew lines around them with the Signo uni-ball and traced the letters with a Sharpie to make it look more like handwriting.

This is truly how I feel about friendship.  I can think of no better way to enter this challenge.  Also I've never done a journal page where I've made the words the only embellishment.

Thanks for organising this again Dawn :)