From the Table to the Wall....

Time again for another Altered Art Challenge over at Altered Eclectics the months are just flying by, bringing us ever closer to Spring, which is one of my favourite times of the year.
For my design team project this month I have altered a place mat..I have quite a stash of them, I mentioned to a friend once that I was going to alter some and she bought me in 6, plus I had some of my own, so I must make use of them.

This is how the place mat started out...I got my grandson to drill a couple of small holes at one end...then I set to sanding down the glossy top layer of the laminate, it did take a while by hand and if you suffer with a dust allergy or a breathing disorder, make sure you wear a mask.
Brush all the dust off the place mat when you have finished sanding.

The next stage was to cover the place mat with black gesso, once dry I went over that with black acrylic paint.

I dried the paint with my heat tool, then added some terracotta acrylic paint in a few places and pulled that through using an old bank card...I liked the effects as it gave a scraped effect to the paints.

Again I dried the paint with the heat tool.

I mixed some terracotta paint with some texture paste and swiped that over some stencils...leaving everything to dry completely overnight.

The next day I used gilding wax ( Hematite colour) over the textured areas and a few places on the board, which gave it a nice gunmetal blue to the areas that I applied it to.

All the embellishing items came from my stash, I used Tim Holtz backing papers and a small photo booth photo that I distressed, the main image of the boys was a freebie that I've hanging around for years. I also added some hessian and rusty paperclips.

 I found a leather boot lace that was just perfect to use as the hanging strap...

You can find the challenge over at 

Altered Eclectics