Holiday Celebrations with Distress Paint

Ready to be festively distressed once again? The Dream Team have been playing with Ranger's Distress Paints, and are ready to inspire you to be distressed as well...paint distressed that is!

Dreamweaver Stencils are the perfect choice to mix with all things festively distressed, as nothing shows off color and texture better than great designs. By following our hop and leaving love along the way, you have the opportunity to win a great prize package including five Ranger Distress Paints and five Dreamweaver Stencils! Here's the lineup for today, including our November Guest Designer:

Dream It Up!

Linda Neff (GD)

Cyndi Bundy

Lyn Bernatovich

Terrece Siddoway

Wendy Jordan

Heidi Erickson

Cherylynn Moser

Laura Drahozal

Louise Healy

Stacey Rumsby

Pam Hornschu

Lea Kimmel

This is also our first posting day featuring our new monthly challenge, "Holiday Celebrations", and for the entire month we will be demonstrating ways to use Beacon Adhesives' entire line of products with Dreamweaver to create special projects in home decor and gifts of love.

I had a lot of fun playing with the Distress Paints. They are a lot different than traditional acrylic craft paint because they are so much thinner. For me, that was both a good thing and a bad thing!

Since I am all about quick and easy, especially when it comes to the holidays and gift giving, I created two very easy and VERY inexpensive projects to share with you.

The first one was the most inexpensive. I started out with cheap ceramic tiles from the hardware store. I think they were like 16 cents each! My plan is to make a set of four of these and turn them into coasters tied with a ribbon.

Supplies Used: Dreamweaver LJ 849 Bare Trees Stencil
Ranger Distress Paint: Peeled Paint, Rusty Hinge, Barn Door and Black Soot
Beacon Fabri-Tac Adhesive

Instructions:

• Sand tile with 240 grit sandpaper and spray with acrylic primer. Let dry.
• Dab Distress Paint onto tile and mist with water to encourage blending/marbling. Heat set to dry.
• Align stencil over dry paint and using a stencil brush, rouge on black soot. Heat set to dry. (HINT: I first sprayed the back of the stencil  with stencil adhesive. This helped it to form a tight seal against the tile and prevented seepage.) 
• Spray deal glossy sealer.
• Glue felt to bottom with Fabri-Tac. (Hint: I first applied Dreamweaver Original Embossing Paste to back of tile to smooth out ridges so that the felt had a smooth, flat surface to adhere to.

What do you think? Kind of fun, kind of artsy..which is.not to be said for  project two!

For project two, I went clean, simple and very, very easy. This one cost a little more. I think $1.50!

Supplies used: Various Dreamweaver Snowflake stencils and Ranger Picket Fence Distress Paint

While perusing the craft store the other day I came across these beautiful blue chargers that were on sale for $1.50. I just couldn't resist buying them (and the black ones as well!). Now what to do with them? They were too pretty just to sit under another plate. And then the light bulb went off. Turn them into cookie platters for holiday gifts! And voila! this is the end result.

Very simple to so. Wash the charger first in warm soapy water and dry well. Then adhere stencils to the platters (again, I sprayed the stencils with spray stencil adhesive). Then using a rouging motion, I gently swirled on the Picket Fence paint. Once it was dry, I again applied a food safe sealer. 

Now won't those look pretty all covered in cookies! Hmmm, now if only I can find the time to bake the cookies!

I hope you've enjoyed these two little treats I've created for you. Hopefully they've inspired you to start working on your holiday and hostess gifts. I have more projects in the works that use Distress Paints and I will share those with you sometime next week!

Until then, finish hopping along this week's blog hop and remember to take some time TODAY to create. It's good for your soul!