January Project of the Month - Mixed Media Coasters

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I'm starting a new monthly series called Project of the Month (POTM)! Each month I will provide a FREE project sheet with supply list and instructions for an easy way to use some supplies! And of course if you need any additional supplies, I'll have them all linked on a special POTM page. 

For the month of January I'm featuring some awesome A4 Transfer Sheets from Dress My Craft that offer a really easy way to embellish some very simple MDF coasters. 

Even though these are used on MDF Coasters, you could also easily use them on the MDF Artist Trading Cards that we have in stock! I see a lot of possibilities for these transfer sheets. 

I just painted the background with my favorite aqua paint from Dylusions, adding in a few swipes of a creamy color from Dina Wakley (both acrylic paints) and then after they dried (only took a few minutes), I used a sponge to apply the image transfer. Just like those temporary tattoos that we used to apply as a kid, but these are permanent on the coaster! 

I stamped a couple of sentiments from a Prima stamp set, I tried to think of phrases that would make me smile as I reached for my morning cup of coffee or my drink during dinner.  Then I splattered a little black paint that was thinned with water (Dina Wakley calls this "the pox" and boy was I covered in paint splatters after I was done!). Acrylic ink or fluid acrylic would also work well.

I added a little sparkle with some metallic bronze paint but the fun part is adding finishing touches.

And very last, I applied a coat of Liquitex Gloss Varnish (I'm sure gloss medium would also work), just to seal it since I knew it would be exposed to moisture from the cups.

So far we've used them with every dinner and they are holding up nicely plus keeping my table dry! 

I think these would be super fun if you added a little hanging tab you could just hang them on the wall (I love the 3M poster strips, they don't damage the wall or the art piece).

So here is a little time lapse I created while I was working on the coasters. You can get an idea of what I did to make them. It was really very fast, maybe 30 minutes start to finish! If you want to hop over to YouTube you can subscribe to my channel and find out when I load new videos. I'm hoping to be able to do more project videos very soon.

So I hope you like this project and you'll check out the January Project of the Month. If mixed media isn't really your cup of tea, no worries, Saturday was a very crafty day for me because I also made some Valentine's Day cards AND a couple of beautiful (I think) cards using the Vintage Roses set from Altenew (which will be available very soon!) I'll share more about the Vintage Roses set and those cards in my post next week!

I always post about these projects right away on my Instagram account, but here are the Valentine's theme cards I made.

The one on the left is a shaker card, the right is more of my mixed media style with a painted book page in the background. I used a stamp and die set from Waffle Flower for these (notice the left has the die cut, the right is the "negative" of the cut space).

This could easily be replicated with any word die and I have several options in the Sentiments section of the shop!

I hope you have a very crafty day!

See you next week.

Anna

P.S. Don't forget that ALL Altenew, Waffle Flower and Spellbinders products are 10% off right now during the Celebration of Craft SALE!