A New Challenge/and a Winner to Start the Month of May

Welcome to the merry month of May! The Dream Team are challenging you this month to a "Flora and Fauna" theme! Considering most of the Dreamweaver designs incorporate both of these in the huge variety of stencils, you should have no problem playing along with our challenge this month! As usual, link your creations at the end of the Dream It Up! blog post, or at the end of our posts where it says, "Add Your Link". As the challenge gets underway, you'll see thumbnails of others who are playing along as inspirations for your own creations! Speaking of inspirations...the month of April was our Inspirations month, and we had so many that linked with us! So exciting! Our randomly chosen winner for April is...JULIE STAVES! Check out two of her creations...

Congrats, Julie! Be sure to email lynell@dreamweaverstencils.com with your choice of stencil, and your address!

Here is Lynell's post:

Although I often refer to Thursday's as Dream Schemes our challenges are actually monthly. I try to post each week though, and if I am traveling, Pam Hornschu takes care of things for me here on my blog. Our challenge for the month of May is all about Fauna and Flora. This suits me just fine, because Wayne and I love nature and have a plethora of stencils that are flowers and creatures to tease your creative spirit. We have three new designs that should be ready the end of this month. We are traveling the first part of the month so be patient and we will hit it running when we get back and have them ready to ship before you know it.

New Heron stencil design LG757

Here is our creature for the first week of May:

Our new informal word for using the stencils with Zentangle patterns is "Sten-tangle". Wayne is a CZT...a Certified Zentangle Teacher and often uses his knowledge to create ZIA or Zentangle inspired art.  

As often is the case, Wayne did the Zentangle-ation of this critter and I did the background and put the card together....teamwork! 

I started by doing the "letterpress" technique for the background. This means placing the new heron stencil (LG757) in my spray box (merely a large cardboard box that protects the surrounding area from overspray) and sprayed it with two or three colors of Memories Mists sprays. 

Then I placed it on the thick white plate (inked side up) of my Big Shot. (I often protect the white plate from wet ink seepage by putting down a piece of scrap paper first.)

Next I placed a white piece of cardstock on top of the inked stencil and gently held it in place while I placed my thick Stamping Details mat on top of this stack.

The two acrylic plates now cover the rubber mat. Then I rolled this "stack" of plates and stencil with cardstock through the machine. The result is the background you see in the picture of smeared ink that highlights your stencil image.

I proceeded to clean off the stencil and repositioned it onto the heron "print". Because the heron was white like the cardstock color I then stenciled it with a soft golden or yellow ochre colored dye ink. In the last phase of creation and to give this bird's silhouette some character, Wayne then tangled several patterns onto the bird and branches. There are actual names for official Zentangle patterns. The body of the bird is done with a pattern called "flourish" and the eye is "marasu" and the legs are "tripoli"....and the list goes on...these are all simply done and simple to learn. This beautiful form of meditation is a way of relaxing and creating at the same time.

We hope you will join us this month with some wonderful creations of fauna and flora of your own making! You could be a random winner of a Dreamweaver Stencil. 

Please welcome our new "A" team, officially posting for the first time!

Dream It Up!

Leadonna Kimmel

Louise Healy

Laura Drahozal

Lynn Mercurio

Pam Hornschu

Jamie Martin

An InLinkz Link-up