Some stunning new papers!

Two posts in one day (can you tell I'm procrastinating the housework)!

I think I've said before on here how much I love the work of the talented Finnabair (see her blog here). She just has the most incredible and gorgeous sense of colour and texture in her work. Clearly I'm not the only one who thinks so, as she has now designed her own scrapbooking papers for 7 Dots Studio.
Her first collection was called Dreamer and her second, due to be released very soon, is called Wonderland, loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland (see here).

I think my favourite paper from the new collection is this one, called 'Mushroom and Smoke':

I love the large dots and was inspired to try creating some template based ATCs. As usual I've made backgrounds with no idea of what to do with them, but what does that matter :0)

The first ATC was covered with wild honey distress stain the stamped in aged mahogany. I sponged white paint over it all to tone down the colours,  then punched different sized circles out of a separate piece of card and used this as a template to sponge on more white paint. I then sponged on some more aged mahogany round the edges - the paint acts slightly as a resist to the ink. Finally I added the bird in black archival.

The second ATC is coloured with broken china, crushed olive and stormy sky distress inks (finally got away from the aged mahogany for a moment or two!), by applying them to my craft sheet, spraying with water then smooshing the card through it, drying and repeating until I was happy with it. I stamped on some checkerboard bits in the same colours,  then used a die cut from a Tim Holtz on the edge die as a stencil for sponging on white paint. The houses didn't show up too well so using the die cut as a stencil again I sponged on some glossy accents. when that was dry it worked as a resist for some more stormy sky ink to emphasize the houses.   

I may add further embellishments to these later - what do you think?

xx