Meet Miss Maisie Greyfur!

Hi, servus and thanks for stopping by today!
It's still quite fresh outside, but at least the snow has gone and I am optimistic that spring has finally arrived by now!

The last weeks with snowstorms and icy temperatures were well spent indoors at my studio desk which I am - to my own surprise - still managing to keep organized and tidied up most of the time. ;)

I recently was very lucky to get some of the fab StencilGirl® stencils to play with and this is the result of my first happy stencilling session using their designs:

It's a journal I made using Eileen Hull's "Journal" die and left overs from packagings. The back and front covers show a single scene:

Please, meet Miss Maisie Greyfur, who is enjoying her first cup of tea (I'm sure it is a strong tasty Yorkshire blend!) of this year in her outskirts garden plot while admiring the first buds on the still bare trees.

I used the Wolf, City Stories and City Scape StencilGirl® stencils alongside some DecoArt media products to create my little romantic early Spring garden scene.

As I always feel quite uneasy with starting from the plain page, I love to create a patterned background by scraping on paints with a palette knife. Some wet on wet, others on top of already dried layers. This time I've used DecoArt Chalky Finish paints alongside some white premium Gesso. 

Once that had dried I sprayed on some Orange DecoArt Mister and spritzed that with water to let the paint run down my cover. Spritzes of white Shimmer Mister were added too. 

I then started with adding the skyline, dabbing on premium paints Carbon Black and Prussian Blue Hue wet on wet with a cosmetic sponge. I also went in with a bit of white and let that mix with the wet paint on the cover to create an ombre effect.

Miss Maisie was stencilled on using white premium Gesso and Carbon Black - mixing them on my palette first before sponging them on.

That was followed by adding the houses and tree shapes in Carbon Black.

Later I also added raindrops and parts of the flowery border from the City Stories stencil to form a part of the garden fence at the very bottom of the back cover. 

Using a detail brush and white DecoArt media Gesso, I painted Miss Maisie's fur and the cup she's holding. I also went in with a dark grey that I mixed from white Gesso and Carbon Black premium paint to paint some shades to the hind legs and the fur. 

Black archival stamping ink was used to stamp my quotes to the back and front covers.

I added some details with a white gel pen. 

The pages for the journal were made  by folding and cutting to size some sheets of heavy printer paper to form three signatures. These were literally "bound" to the cover's spine with some dark grey cord. I simply inserted each of the signatures and tied knots in their centre folds. What I like about this very simply binding, is that the pages can be removed and/or replaced quickly and easily without having to undo the binding. 

I hope you like Miss Maisie's garden and view as much as she does. She always loves to escape the noise and hectic of the city and enjoy some piece and quiet in the outskirts...

A huge THANK YOU to the kind ladies from StencilGirl® for letting me have some awesome fun with some of their stencils! 

Hugs and happy crafting!

Claudia

xxx