MyGrafico Challenge No # 60 Wild Flower Stamps: Distress Vintage Mini Notebook

Hi Dandi Crafters, today's challenge over at MyGrafico is to make a distressed vintage project. The stamps that we used to inspire us are called Wild Flower Stamps by Mel's Brushes. Be sure to head over to the MyGrafico Challenge Blog and see what the whole creative design team came up with and enter your own project.

As for me....well this project is one of the reasons I like being on a design team! Vintage and distressed is just not something I would ever tackle without a good reason. I would have avoided this challenge had I not been on the design team. LOL! Like most people I tend to stick with the styles I do well that I am comfortable with and vintage distressed is not one of them. I admire, even love, projects with this look but it is not my strong suit.
The whole time I was working on this project I kept saying, "Oh My! This just isn't going to work out." I get like that sometimes when I am drawing too. Sometimes you have to complete the journey for it all to come together and make sense, if I  didn't know this from my experience drawing, I would have scrapped this project before it even got going....LOL
Overall I have to say I was extremely happy with the way my mini notebook turned out.
What I did was was, wash my hands because I had about 3 pieces of Hershey's Nugget Candies while contemplating. LOL I find that chocolate calms me when I am about to embark on unfamiliar territory in the craft room. LOL
I printed out about 6 flowers on white card stock. I cut them out and cut all but 1 apart. I then proceeded to crumple them up, put them through the crimper a few times and then smoothed them. Next I took out some Martha Stewart pigment ink pads in yellow, orange, pink and red and proceeded to bounce these inks all over all the flowers and pedals. After that I used some cuttlebug dry embossing folders to add texture. Finally I added more pigment ink to bring out the embossing. I then glued the various pieces onto the full flower after curling them all with a pencil. I used my crop a dile and punched a hole in the middle of the flower and on the cover and secured using an eyelet. I used a brad to decorate the center.
To make the cover I used white card stock and bounced pigment inks all over it and then dry embossed and smeared on more pigment inks to bring out the embossing. I then used my crop o dile to punch holes along the left side and slit each punched whole in the middle so it would fit over the wires. I wanted the word Notes to look the same but not get lost in the background. So I printed some brown grunge paper I made on my computer on beige card stock. I then took pigment inks to each letter after cutting. The font fit perfectly with this theme and is called Big Top. I then added ribbon in various colors and cropped each diagonally. Then being a former bow chick, I heat sealed the ribbon so it wouldn't fray.