Welcome Home by Gill Humphrey

There are several collections from Stamperia that have a home theme - Casa Granada and Welcome Home being two of them and so the idea of the multi house Upright was born. These can be decorated in so many different ways; the beauty of being a crafter is you can customise the MDF according to your own taste. First of all I decided where I wanted to place each house on the base - the slots mean that the positions are not all fixed increasing flexibility of use. Having decided on the layout I then set about decorating my project.

Two of the Uprights were painted with blue acrylic paint and once that had dried I used the Cracking Paste system - to use this you need to first apply a layer of Cracking Paste Primer and allow it to dry before adding the paste over the top. The size of the cracks varies depending on how thick you layer the Cracking Paste over the top - thin layer equals small cracks, thick layer equals larger cracks. I tend to deliberately vary the thickness as it adds visual interest to the pieces. I covered both the front and back of the houses taking care to avoid going over the slots that fit into the base, both components of the Cracking Paste system can be dried with a heat tool meaning it does not take forever to do the two sides.

The remaining two house Uprights were painted with White Primer Paste which sinks into the MDF leaving a matte surface with a slight colour from the MDF. On top of the dried primer paste I added detail by applying Viintage Photo Distress Oxide through a bricks stencil. I then used the same stencil which deliberately had not been clean to apply more bricks using Structure Paste to the base of the Upright, this meant that the structure paste was coloured by the remaining ink on the stencil giving a variegated brick effect.

I selected images from the Welcome Home Collectables papers and fussy cut them out - you can also use images from the 8 x 8 paper pad to add the windows, doors and quotes to the houses. I then layered with foam pads some of the cats, plant pots and dots from the collection in front of the doors. At this stage I adhered the Uprights into place.

For added interest I chose to use the bird house, dog and birds from the Wooden Shapes Houses set as shown in the photograph and then added the butterflies from the village Ephemera set to the houses. 

To decorate the base of the piece I added chipboard flowers  from the die cut pack from the collection and then some 3D balls.