Marie Antoinette goes Paddling, inspired by Helen Chilton for Paper Artsy

One of my favourite people, Helen Chilton, popped up on the Paper Artsy blog on Friday night with a delightful sea casket full of brightly coloured fish! Although I've already done a challenge entry this week, my dear friend Petra has just kindly given me two of the seaside Hot Picks stamp sets including the one Helen used, and I loved the way the anchor background made the casket look like wood, so I had to have a go.

 

For the casket I followed Helen exactly. For the images I painted some heavy smoothy stamping card with Nougat and then stamped them with black archival and coloured them with Fibralos and fussy cut them. I am loving the Fibralos!!! Thank you Darcy for test-driving them; I am not sure how I lived without them.

As I'm still in art doll mode following Penny Nuttall's wonderful inspiration this week I decided to use the beautiful 'Marie Antoinette' Lynne Perrella image as it has a shell for a parasol and I thought it would be fun to have her paddling amongst the shells. I supported her on a coffee stirrer (do people actually stir their coffee with these or are they just for craft purposes?) and glued it into a wooden stool so it is self-supporting. I then popped it in the casket surrounded by shells and used a piece of net from fruit packaging (thank you, Jean!) for the fish.

 

 

This was a very quick project and such fun and I am entering it into the challenge, inspired by Helen Chilton. Also wanted to mention that I found my missing stamp. Phew! I hadn't thrown it away, it was stuck to the bottom of something. Can I have back the hours I spent looking?!