Whiff of Joy - Project of the Month

Katharina set us a challenge for this months project of the month - to decorate a candle. Now candle wax and a heat gun together conjure up the stuff of nightmares for me lol - just as well it's Halloween then!

I decided to not only do a stamped candle but to make a matching microscope slide ornament for my Christmas tree (I love Christmas and have 100's and 100's of baubles - watch this space when me tree goes up next month lol). I also love Yankee candles but feel the sticker on the front could do with covering up so made a label to cover their brand sticker.

I used Melinda Helping Angel as my main image and went with autumnal colours. I used a Whiff of Joy sentiment stamp and also used a Stampin Up scroll stamp to balance the image by placing the scrolls either side.

I stamped Melinda out, painted with distress inks and H2O's, chalked around the edges of the circle to age it a bit. I punched holes on either side of the circles to thread the ribbon through. Really quick and easy and so effective I think.

I love working with microscope slides so made one to complete my little set. Scroll down for pics and instructions on how I did it.

For the stamped candle, I stamped the image on to tissue paper, placed this on to some folded tissue, took a deep breath and attacked the image with distress inks, Koi water brush and H2O's. The tissue under the image absorbs a lot of the excess water - I was surprised at how well it worked!! I cut closely around the image (didn't trust that the extra would disappear when heated lol)

I didn't have any greaseproof paper so had to use baking parchment - it seemed to work okay. The trick was keeping the paper taught whilst heating with a heat gun and trying to check that I didn't have a gloopy mess instead of a candle.

For the Microscope Slide I used Memory Glass slides, Memory Foil tape (self adhesive) and a couple of images painted with distress inks and H2O's.

Before painting I placed the slides on to the image and traced around and just painted the bit I needed.

Cut this out and distress the edges with chalk inks or distress inks and glitter the wings.

Make sure that you don't touch the sides of the glass that are going to be on the inside else you will have fingerprints on the finished slide. Run some gold cord on the back of one of the images having a loop at the top and excess at the bottom to thread some beads on, glue the second image back to back to the first one. Place the glass slides on both images.

Starting at the top, run the foil tape around the slide. Once this is all in place start with the corners and your bone folder and work the corners in, giving it a good old polish with the folder to smooth the lumps and bumps. Once the corners are done work your way around the remainder of the slide with the bone folder, on both sides. Take a cloth and give it another rub to make sure the foil is as smooth as possible.

Apologies for the long post - hope this is clear enough - I'm not very good at explaining things.

Thanks for looking,