I am just plum tickled with myself!

Okay, so I got to rummaging the other day, and I found a cross-stitch that my mom did for me when I turned 21.  Very cute, it's hanging in my craft room now.  But, it was in this large, flat gold box.  Like this:

Not a terribly pretty box...

So, I decided to take this box and do something with it. Partly because I want new wall art, and partly to see if I could.  And because I love some of the pieces my friend Jessie over at Points for Creativity has been doing with various surfaces, scrap-booking papers, and Mod Podge. I painted the box black (I have some of Plaid's FolkArt pigment paints.  Man is that stuff thick!  Perfect for a thing like this...) and started selecting papers.  Then I remembered the 1001 copies of Macbeth I own... Okay, not really that many, but I have 4 or 5, at least. Because I am an English teacher, and we do things like that. So, as we're nearing the Halloween-ie season, which always makes me think oddly enough of the Macbeth witches, because they are the quintessential Halloween witch / hag. Plus, I've recently discovered I can draw a rather rudimentary bird, so I decided to use those, too!

And, at Dollar Tree last week, I found these rather hideous shadow-box frames that proclaimed, loudly and often "It's a Boy." So, of course, I had to do something with those. Here's the original, sort of:

Gotta love the Dollar Tree!

Hideous, yes? Anyways, I sanded those down, and painted them black, as well.

So, after the paint finally dried (I hate waiting for paint to dry.  and glue... anything that must dry, really...) I pulled out the old Macbeth and ripped out all the witchy pages (well, except for the ones I had written on while I read the play for class.  yeah, it was that copy...) Then, I sketched out a biggish bird, and Mod Podged the opening scene onto him. Here he is drying:

After I arranged the scrapbook papers to my liking, I took a pic to remember:

Rough draft!

Then I pulled out the Mod Podge!  Cuz, you know, Mod Podge really does rock! Note to self--vellum does not like Mod Podge at all.  It was all sorts of bubbly, and there was NOTHING my brand new brayer (yay! I finally got a brayer!!!) could do to fix it. So I switched out the other vellum pieces I'd been planning on using.  Then, of course, it had to dry!  Joy!

Then I remembered the little frames!  And I thought they would look awfully nice with something to go with the big piece.  So I rummaged in my papers again, and found a few more to match the big piece, cut out two smaller birds, and Mod Podged more bits of the play on them. Once they all dried, I put everything together!

So here's the finished project:

The finished gathering

This is the Hecate scene

The witches are telling Banquo his future.  Poor guy.  Pretty sure it gets him killed...

Just another view

Those two pages of text are the "Double, double, toil and trouble" scene.  One of my favorites.  They add all sorts of unsavory things to the brew!!

The title bird!  

So there it is!  This past weekend's project!

RLW