Mixed Media Beach Bathroom Decor

Heyyyy crafters! Let me first remind you of the release sale at Rubber Dance - with 20 % discount on all the new stamps. The sale ends on Tuesday, midnight CET. (Between you and me: I'm rarely up that late, so the sale ends after I get up on Wednesday morning, usually around 5 o'clock-ish, and get a chance to change the reduced prices).

I made this wall decor to send to Anti-Santa, or whatever the Santa in Antarctica is called. Since there are no penguins on the North Pole, it would be so silly to send this to the Santa up north, wouldn't it?

Turns out I didn't have the southern Santa's address in my Rolodex (remember those?), so I hung the sign up in our downstairs bathroom (aka loo), which has a beach theme. Not that we live on the beach, but a few times a day I can always pretend... (Raise your hand if you just starting singing "The Great Pretender", Freddy Mercury version! Grab a banana and slap me over the head if you can't get the song out of your mind!)

Properly propped on the bathroom basin with bath towels and sea shells (and a lighthouse to the left):

I posted this photo over at the Rubber Dance blog for my stamp release last week, but I thought I'd share some details with you. I stamped the Playful Penguins on watercolour paper, coloured them in with Zig clean colour makers, cut them out and set aside.

The surface I used is a 15 x 15 cm white/greyboard panel with rounded corners, from That's Crafty in the UK (you can find it here - pack of 5 for only £2.25!). These are white on one side and grey on the other, and I used the white side - without adding gesso first.

I wanted to test the crackle paste I had bought after a friend recommended it. I have tried quite a few crackle mediums, but frankly not been all that impressed with them - but I really liked this one! I'm not affiliated with the brand, which is Finnabair/Prima's Texture Paste White Crackle. I covered the whole board with the crackle paste, using a broad palette knife. I made both thin and thick layers to achieve different sized cracks. After having left it to dry for the cracks to appear, I smeared some acrylic paint in blue and green on top and wiped off some of the paint with a baby wipe.

The MFD signpost (below) is from Calico Craft Parts in the UK, and you can find it here (I'm not affiliated, just a very excited customer!). I love that it's so big - over 10 cm tall and 12 cm wide. I painted the signpost with white gesso and aged it with brown ink. The text was painted with blue acrylic paint, then some glitter on top to make it look more frosty (it does sparkle in real life...).
The "snow" is made with art stones (Finnabair/Prima), which I hadn't used before so I wasn't sure how to glue them down... but it worked fine with a thick layer of matte medium.

The very same day I was working on this, I received some happy mail - and one of the postal stamps was this with two penguins!!

So, there it is - Frankie goes to Hollywood has nothing on my Penguins goes to Anti-Santa!

The rest of this post is a promotion of my stamp company, Rubber Dance.
Just skip to the end if you're not interested.

 This is what the set of Playful Penguins looks like

(13 x 18 cm, or 5 x 7 inches if that's how you roll ...)

Other new sets, also at 20 % right now:

These two 9 x 13 cm sheets, packed full of funny sentiments

(at least I find them funny..... that's why I made'em!)

 ..... and this 13 x 18 sheet of lovely winter stamps:

 Hurry if you want that 20 % discount, 

the sale ends verrah soon!

All the new stamps are in the Rubber Dance web shop.

Thanks for looking!