Ideas to Inspire with Kiwi Lane and Hemptique

Happy Wednesday!  I feel like I was just doing a blog post... maybe because this is my third one in four weeks... a rarity, for sure!  Hope you're not too tired of me yet! ;)

For this installment of Ideas to Inspire for Kiwi Lane, I was given the opportunity to work with a company I've never worked with before. Gasp!  What?  A crafting company whose product I don't already have in my stash?!  Seriously.  It happens.  And much more often than people may think.  Especially after they view my wall-o-supplies that lines the dining area in our house.  One day I should share that with the world.  But not today.  Today, I get to share with you wonderful product from Hemptique!

I was, oh, so happy when I was sent some of Hemptique's metallic hemp cord!  This is what it looks like:

I had lots of visions of the billions of projects I could do with it, but then realized that I had to narrow it down just a bit.... to one project, to be more accurate.  So I decided to use it like I would use embroidery floss and stitch on a layout.  Hemp cord is a little bit thicker and stiffer than embroidery floss, but it's still fairly easy to work with.  Here's the layout I came up with:

I framed my page using the Kiwi Lane Templates:

And then after I traced, cut, inked and replaced:

Supplies: patterned paper, cardstock stickers (My Mind's Eye); sequins (Teresa Collins Design); cord (Hemptique); stitching template, letter stickers (American Crafts); paper flowers (Prima); pen (Staedtler); ink (Ranger)

(I used My Mind's Eye's Lucky in Love collection.... and yes, I changed my mind about the background paper after I had everything laid out- it happens a lot.  One of the advantages of using the templates!)

I started working with my Hemptique cord and realized that it wasn't quite the color I wanted- all the hemp was natural color and the metallic strings are intertwined.  I knew I wanted the metallic, but decided to see if the hemp would take color.  So I conducted a little experiment- I put a length of cord in a plastic baggie and sprayed some ink in the bag and squished the cord around in the ink.  And it worked!  A little too well, actually.  I ended up rinsing the cord to remove some of the blue color because it was so dark it looked almost black- pretty, but not quite right for my project.

So what was I going to stitch?  I wasn't sure, but then I saw an advertisement for a sale on fabric at a craft store.  Muslin and tulle.  I thought that they would be fairly easy to cut and stitch, so off to the store I went!  I made my huge purchase of 12" of white muslin and 12" of pink tulle (a whoppin' 56 cents worth of fabric) and ran home to get to work!  Seriously, kids, I don't remember the last time I was this excited to work with fabric and string.... probably never.

I started by tracing the flower shape from the Sweetheart accessory set onto the muslin, cut it out, then realized that I didn't really want to stitch around a flower shape.  That's too complicated.  ;)  So I opted to use the larger circle in the Shapes Tiny Accessory template set.  I cut a layer of muslin and a layer of tulle (netting) and also a circle of pink lightweight cardstock to add some stability.  I used the smaller circle from the same set to pierce holes to stitch through.  Towards the end of stitching the circle, I thought it would be fun to make the circle into a shaker box... sort of.  So I threw some sequins in between the muslin and tulle and finished stitching.  The circle became the middle of the large flower.  I tore strips of the white muslin to run through the entire layout and stitched some pink x's on the border.

While I never would have thought to use hemp cording on a scrapbook page before this, I'm certainly glad I got to try it!  I love the way it turned out!!  Hemptique makes other cording, string and yarn out of natural fibers like cotton and bamboo- some are natural colored and some are dyed.  They even have some cute looking bamboo bakers twine that I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some!

Thanks for stopping by and happy scrapping!  Don't forget to come back tomorrow for the announcement of the winner from the Kiwi Lane blog hop!

Templates used:

• Sweetheart 1, 3
• Clara 1A, 1B, 3A, 3B
• Tiny Shapes 3T, 7T
• Thoughtful 2A, 2B
• Strips
• Photos
• Tiny Photos