Heart carving for leonie

Hello lovely peeps and a warm welcome to all of my new followers. I'm such a lucky girlie :)

 Today I'm sharing my little heart carving with you.

As a youngster, did you ever carve yours and your boyfriend/girlfriend's initials into a tree's bark, surrounded by a heart? This is what popped into my mind after I'd been playing with Leonie's 'Tree Bark' and 'All the Love' dies for a while.  Of course I only ever got as far as drawing one in my school books as a lovestruck teen, not wanting to mutilate a poor tree.

Anyway, I've tried to replicate the idea with my little heart hanging. To start off I die-cut some Kraft card with Leonie's 'All the Love' die

and snipped off the top left heart with my scissors. I did this twice and then painted both hearts with Titanium White acrylic paint
 

Next I glued a heart onto another piece of Kraft card with Cosmic Shimmer glue (this is a really strong adhesive) and repeated with the second heart onto yet another piece of Kraft card.

Now I ran the first piece through my Ebosser with the 'Bark Texture' die and glued the die-cut over the top of the second piece (with the same glue).

I painted over the top with a mixture of White Titanium and Burnt Umber acrylic paints, watered down and was slightly horrified to find that it turned purple!
 

I persevered and this time just painted on watered down Burnt Umber, which massively improved it (phew). It turned out to be a happy accident because I think the purple gives an added depth of colour to the finished piece.

Once it was looking a bit more like wood I 'carved' the initials into it by scratching it with a pokey tool. I've added a little cupid's arrow too :)

The 'W' refers, of course, to my fabulous hubby, Will

To finish off I glued the piece onto an MDF heart, trimmed the edges off and added some ribbon & tiny buttons.

I would like to enter this in the following challenges:-
 Crafty Friends Challenge #37 Favourite Embellishment (buttons)
We Love 2 Create #16 Anything Mixed Media Goes
Love to Craft #1 August Anything Goes
The Sisters of Craft  Always Anything Goes

You still have time to enter my blog giveaway, which runs until the 14th of August. You can enter twice if you add the link & pic to your own blog.

 

Thank you for stopping by today, I hope I'll see you again soon.

Katrina x