Our Current Guest Designer - Brenda Brown

It is time to introduce the Guest Designer for our current challenge.  Please say hello and welcome to Brenda Brown of Bumblebees and Butterflies.  Brenda was the Design Team Top Pick from the Let's Make It A Trio challenge.

"Hi Everyone, Brenda here and it's such a pleasure to be a guest at Frilly and Funkie today. I have been blogging for over six years, but I have been designing and creating it seems for ever. I love a vintage, grungy or shabby project to get my teeth into and I'm happiest surrounded by inks, paints and mediums in my workroom. Since taking my art and craft seriously, there are two main people who have influenced me on my creative journey. Tim Holtz has given me the confidence to use distress products and to experiment with how they work together. I have been lucky enough to meet him twice when he has visited the UK and his vintage influence has really rubbed off on me. The other person is Andy Skinner and I have attended quite a few of his workshops where his grungy, time-worn techniques and projects have influenced another side of me that loves layering paints and mediums to create aged and mixed media effects."

"When I got the title 'It's not easy being Green' it didn't take me long to get out my scrap box of painty card leftovers as I know that if they don't get used up soon they are destined for the bin as the box is getting fuller and fuller. But what to do with them? I have a number of items for altering but again I wanted something that had either been used before or was also going to be thrown soon if not used up. If you're like me you're always looking for things to get rid of to make space for the new things that have just dropped through the letterbox. I came upon a tin that has sat on the shelf for at least a couple of years, nothing in it but certainly one that needed changing and altering to be useful. So the seeds of ideas began to form."

"I love collage and often pull images and elements together to compose on projects. Apart from the pretty vintage photo everything else in this collage was taken from a box or tub destined for the bin soon. Left over die-cuts unwanted from previous projects, painty card leftovers and discarded elements have been useful in making something that can be used and kept and treasured.

If you would like more details on how the transformation took place it would be lovely to see you at Bumblebees and Butterflies.

Thanks for stopping by and to the fabulous team here at Frilly and Funkie for having me.

I leave you with a little quote- “Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.” Erma Bombeck"

* * *

We hope you will also recycle or upcycle something and share it in our current challenge, which runs until 11:55 pm EST on May 3rd.