Under the Canopy of Love; It's Good to be the Queen

For this month of love, I've done up a love canopy using Tim Holtz luminary die and several cliparts from Ephemorie Bee and Beekeeping Apiary collection. Though I was pretty late for this Valentine, love is not restricted to only February 14th. It should be forever. And this brought me to recall one of my lecturers from UWA as I studied microbiology during my college years. She once passed a very irony remark about Herpes. She said, "Love is not forever, but Herpes is forever." The class burst into laughter while she remained her poker's face and warned us to lower down our volume.

Alright, not here for a microbiology lesson. But the remark made by my lecturer was indeed too ironically funny that deeply etched into my mind, including some of my other classmates as well. It's simply too amusing not to mention about her whenever we talked about her and her Herpes remark. Oh well, not to give you a very wrong idea about love and it's connection to Herpes, I shall sanctify it by going into the story behind this project.  

Every lady wants to feel like a queen, protected under the love of her man. And that's the idea behind this little project for this month of Love. Specifically on the queen bee concept, I decided to use some honeycombs for the canopy of love. Honey is sweet and so is love. So that's practically the idea behind.

I used one of the whimsical fairy digi stamps from Traci as the main focus of this project. Clearly, it's such a lovely fairy pair! Images of honeycombs, bee frame and crown are resized to what I want based on the measurement of the luminary diecuts prior to printing. I coloured the images with watercolour pencils and then trimmed off the honeycombs to fit around the pillars of the diecut.

Notice the lovely fairy pair are seated on a bed of pollen. These are some yellow sponges in my stash and those little "stones" surrounding the "pollen" are actually from Prima's A Victorian Christmas embellishment. I just tore the sprays apart and surrounded them, including the pinnacle of the canopy. I just love adding some natural elements to my project! And that's why despite I've diecut the luminary with kraft paper, I just want to add some brown paint over to give some woody feel. Then surround the corners with some underbrush and foliage.  

The Queen's crown

Here is a short video walk through I made for this project, with a little story telling as well. I wish I'd had more time to do up an extensive video, however it has been quite a busy and short month for me that I deeply regret not to plan my time well enough. Nonetheless, I do hope this has been inspiring enough for this month of love. More pictures below, as well as a list of supplies I used for this project at the bottom of this entry together with links to where to get them.

I shall be back in March for more project ideas and tutorials. So do stay with me!

List of supplies used for this project:

• Ephemorie Bees & Beekeeping Apiary collection
• Tim Holtz Luminary Bigz XL die (Amazon, Scrapbook.com, Sizzix)
• Tim Holtz Distress Ink in brushed corduroy (Amazon, Blitsy, Scrapbook.com)
• Tim Holtz Distressed stain in tarnished brass (Amazon, Scrapbook.com)
• Prima Marketing A Victorian Christmas embellishment
• Prima Marketing straw jute
• Watercolour pencils
• Kraft cardstock
• Own stash (underbrush and foliage, honeycomb chippies, brown and gold paint)