SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Summer Special Challenge 2018

Hi, servus and welcome to this year's "Summer Special"  at SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges! As every year we are having a two months long challenge throughout the months of July and August, so our players and the design team can enjoy the holidays and have a great time outdoors!

My wonderfully creative design team ladies have done their best as always to inspire and spark new mixed media steampunk and industrial style ideas! There's a link to the challenge at the bottom of this post and I hope to see you over there and play along with us!

In summer my husband and I enjoy sitting on our balcony in the evenings and having a good glass of wine, candle light and some relaxed chatter. I have plenty of tea light holders, but as you can never have enough, I decided to make an industrial style one. The idea comes from a most wonderful tea light holder my friend Kerstin made last Halloween (see her project and post HERE) and I immediately had to buy some wooden tea light holders right after reading her post (thinking of X-mas themed holders mainly)...and then I forgot about them...until now!

 I have used nothing but a wooden tea light holder, matte DecoArt Decou-Page. Metallic Lustre, a few DecoArt Americana premium acrylic paints and some of Calico Craft Parts' really cool Steampipe Maze sheets.

It is great fun to build a steampipe maze around the entire holder - connecting pipes across edges and along corners and using taps and valves from the add on sheets! It is especially great fun if the pipe maze goes round corners and across the edges, including even the top side of the tea light holder!

I played around for some time before I started gluing the first pipes in place (with matte Decou-Page). I started on one side, trying to lead the pipe maze from there across the top to the next side.

Where I had to shorten some of the longer pipe pieces to make them fit, I covered these junctions with taps that I glued on top:

Once the glue had dried, I stippled on some Burnt Umber DecoArt Student Acrylic paint with an old bristle brush.

Once that had dried, I dry brushed the pipes, taps and valves and the edges of the tea light holder with thin layers of DecoArt premium Quinacridone Gold Hue, Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide, Vermillion Hue and Diarylide Yellow until I was content with the look. (the picture sadly doesn't show the subtle rusty tones - but they're there! You will see them with the images of the finished holder). 

 I finished off my piece with adding Orange Flicker DecoArt Metallic Lustre with my fingertip to the pipework and holder edges. 

Done!

I love the subtle rusty tones from the dry brushing against the hints of metal sheen from the Metallic Lustre and the golden glittery tea light was the perfect addition! 

As promised: HERE is the link to our summer special challenge! I hope you like my pipework maze tea light holder and I hope you will like my teamies' makes as well! If you want to make them happy, please, take a minute and leave them a short comment on their blogs. Thank you!

Have a great summer holiday

and don't forget to play along! 

Claudia

xxx