Best of Serendipity

Howdy, folks!  I hope you had a good weekend.  Hubs and I went to Liverpool and had our picture taken on Penny Lane and at Strawberry Field and listened to lots of Beatles music, so that was pretty awesome.  I'll work on posting some Liverpool pics on my other blog (link at right).

Then we got home last night and I saw this sketch from As You See It:

...and I thought hey!  I can do serendipity squares with that.  Behold!

The rectangles are done with the serendipity squares technique (though obviously you don't *have* to make it squares).  I first learned this technique in the Splitcoast Dare to Get Dirty challenges several years ago, and it's fun and freeform and kind of chaotic.  So here's how I did it this time.

Step 1.  Choose your colors.  I wanted to use the Sweater Weather DSP, so I went with Chocolate Chip, Crushed Curry, Sahara Sand, Soft Sky, Tangerine Tango, and Very Vanilla.  Anything goes here, just pick whatever colors appeal to you.

Step 2.  Smoosh some ink pads around on plain ol' Very Vanilla cardstock.  You could do just one or two, but I did three (Crushed Curry, Sahara Sand, and Soft Sky).  I'd stick with the lighter colors for this step or else your stamping won't show up as much.  I stuck my ink pads on the paper and then kind of twisted them, but you could just drag them across the paper or sponge on color or however you want to do it.  It's like improv stamping!

Step 3.  Start stamping in a random pattern.  Generally, I'd advise working with your largest stamp first, which in this case was the ledger stamp from The Open Sea, and then work your way to the smallest stamp.

Step 4.  More stamping, this time I added the leaf from Best of Autumn.   The last stamp I did was the teeny harlequin pattern from Best of Shelli to fill in any bare patches.  If at this point you're thinking you turned a piece of Very Vanilla cardstock into a piece of powerfully ugly cardstock, you're doing it right.

Step 5.  Cut it up or punch it (hexagons would look cool!) or use die cuts, whatever you like to make smaller pieces.  Important safety tip:  when using a guillotine-style paper trimmer, keep track of where your thumb is as you cut.  I totally tried to cut my thumb off today, but luckily I was unsuccessful.  I like my thumbs and prefer to keep both of them firmly attached to my hands.

Step 6.  Sponge the edges.  You could skip that part if you wanted to, but I like the look so I did it (the un-sponged pieces are at the top if you want to see the difference).  Then you just mix up your serendipity pieces and use them on cards.  You could do just one little piece and then cut it up so it's more like a triptych and you can tell it was all one piece, but I like to make lots of pieces and then choose random ones so the pattern doesn't carry over from one piece to the next.

Really, you could vary this technique just about any way you can think of with all kinds of background techniques.  Do polished stone on glossy white cardstock and stamp on that.  Throw some heat embossed stamping on there.  Use painter's tape to make stripes or something.  Got a kitchen sink?  Throw that in there too.  It's very forgiving, and generally I think my whole piece of paper looks really ugly and then somehow it all works once it's cut into smaller pieces : )  For this one, I kinda wished my leaves had shown up a little better on the serendipity, so I just added a leaf to the sentiment piece.

So there you have it!  Now I kinda want to do a more girly serendipity, or maybe a nice wintry snowflake one.  The sky's the limit here, have fun : )  And let me know if you try this technique 'cause I wanna see!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Best of Autumn, Best of Greetings, Best of Shelli, Morning Post Numbers (the frame around my sentiment), The Open Sea
Ink:  Chocolate Chip, Crushed Curry, Sahara Sand, Soft Sky, Tangerine Tango
Paper:  Soft Sky, Chocolate Chip, Very Vanilla, Sweater Weather DSP
Accessories:  Deco Labels Framelits, Dimensionals