~ Jarrod ~ SEPT DIY CHALLENGE TUTORIAL REVEAL

In honour of my oldest son Jarrod's birthday month I decided to select tutorials that could be used for both masculine and feminine LO's for the Sept DIY Challenge over at sb.com which I proudly host. I have chosen the masculine route for my example LO. These tutorials are optional twists that could earn you extra votes, depending on how many you use on a single LO.

For the first tutorial I selected my dear friend and extremely talented Lisa Valentine's Masking Tape background . This is such a fun and extremely easy technique to use and the finished effect is just gorgeous!!!! For my LO I used pine needle, faded jeans and black soot distress inks but this technique looks absolutely fabulous done using browns. You get a real weathered leather look which would work great on a vintage LO.
I used mine to frame the photograph of my DS.

For the second tutorial I selected a video tutorial for Dried Satin Roses I found while browsing through some flower tuts on YouTube. What's great about this tutorial is that you can make them as feminine or as masculine as you like. For my LO I chose to use plain black but I have done these before layering various colours or even 2-3 shades of the same colour which can look really gorgeous. Just be sure to use satin or a similar fabric because lighter fabrics will burn/melt too quickly with the heat gun.

I recently made the best aquisition ever. I bought Tim Holtz's Compendium Of Curiosities and am just loving trying out his techniques. I started off with the easier ones just to build my confidence because I felt a little overwhelmed when I first studied the book. In this LO I tried out the masking. I used the pine needles distress ink as my bg colour and then applied the masks to the paper and used black soot distress ink to shadow the mask shapes.
This is obviously one of the easiest tecniques but I absolutely love the finished look. I'll definitely be investing in more masks.

And here is my very first attempt at embossing. I used faded jeans for the bg and then embossed some flourishes onto the bg using black soot distress embossing powder.
I just love the unfinished distressed look of this embossing powder. It definitely suites my style and I'm extremely excited about embossing more in future.

I also embossed these wooden letters for my title. I first inked the chips with some pine needle distress ink and then embossed them using the black soot distress powder again. As you can see the distress powder has release crystals which don't melt and rub off showing the bg colour. This gives an aged weather look which is GORGEOUS IRL.
Stay tuned for more projects using Tim's fabulous techniques and if you don't have your own copy of "Compendium of Curiosities" yet, I highly recommend you invest in one.