Guest Designer - Elle/Empire of the Cat

The Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog is delighted to welcome back Elle from Empire of the Cat!  Elle was our overall winner for the recent 

Hi there!  It's Elle again from Empire of the Cat.  I'm so excited to be Guest Designer at The Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog for the second time! I really enjoy the variety of the Funkie Junkie challenges and great DT inspiration so it's very exciting to be the featured Guest Designer again. I love to make things, all kinds of things, and I have always been that way.  My main forms of creating at the moment are art journaling, writing, sewing, and practicing my drawing and painting.  I try to draw or paint every day, even if it is just something tiny.  I feel better if I do and worse if I don't so it's worth making the effort.  There is a long story behind the name of my website but you can probably tell that I love cats and I have been blogging there since 2005.   My blog is where I share my arty experiments and feature my little cat family. I hope that you will feel inspired to drop by and say hello! 

Project Info:  As I was thinking about the challenge brief, the idea of "an apple for the teacher" kept running through my head, and as I thought about the time of year, it being September, etc., the idea of a pumpkin instead of an apple popped into my head.  From there, the idea to make some kind of 3D or pop-up card took off and I decided to use book paper to make it.  

I used a Sizzix/Tim Holtz oval die to cut all my pumpkin pieces because I couldn't trust myself to do a good job of cutting them accurately by hand and they do need to be accurate.  I'm sure you will be able to tell what Book I am using but don't worry, it was a very old battered copy from a charity shop.  I coloured a few pages using Distress Ink but then changed my mind and chose to keep them uncolored as all those pumpkin colours were reading as Halloween and not Back to School.  I assembled my pumpkin pieces and the darkened the edges with Archival ink in dark brown, then I made my card base and used another page from the book to cover the front.  The page I used is actually about the hero traveling to his very famous school.  I added some white gesso to the page to tone down the print then attached my 3D pumpkin to the bottom of the card.  I drew on the pumpkin leaves and vines and then added some small word stickers to read "A pumpkin for the teacher."  The pumpkin "book" is made of pages involving a back to school feast in the great hall and the recipient could flick through the pumpkin pages to read little snippets from the goings-on at the school.  There are more photos and details on my blog.  

Thank you, Elle, for giving us such a great piece of inspiration.  We hope it will inspire many more entries into our current Back to School challenge!