Make It Monday~Multi-Media Temple Art

I hope you like this as much as I do!  I made it for a friend and now intend to make one for my home too, perhaps with some lettering on it like "I love to see the temple" or "Forever Families".  If you're interested in making one of your own, make a comment and I'd be willing to do a tutorial video :)

I wanted to use a variety of mediums for this so I started with decoupaging the sky-elmer's glue watered down, and torn pieces of tissue paper.  I had considered doing watercolor for the sky but I had the tissue paper out for gift wrapping and I'm frankly not very talented at watercolor (something I'd like to improve someday).

For the grass, I cut out some paper and then used a green sharpie to make my "swirl art"-one of my favorite techniques, to give it more texture and liveliness.

The temple itself is a bit more taxing.  I actually hand-carved the stamp for this myself a few years ago.  I am not good at drawing and finding a front view of our Spokane WA temple is a hard task anyway due to the stake center being so close in proximity to it.  I did take some pictures and hired someone on fiverr.com to turn it into an outline.  Seriously some of the best $5 I've spent!  Taking the outline, I carved and mounted a rubber stamp out of it to be used for wedding cards or other occasions.  I even used it for my own temple marriage/sealing invites!  As for having your own temple outline...maybe you're better at drawing than me?  Or can find a coloring book style picture elsewhere?

I sewed both the grass and temple onto the blue background and then hand-sewed on the heart and white buttons (pure in heart?  I love to see the temple?) Tip:use a large stitch otherwise it will shred up the paper.  Also, I used a loose needle afterward on the corner pictured and fed the loose ends of thread to the back and tied them securely.

As for the flowers-they are made by quilling.  I absolutely adore quilling and have always wanted to learn how...so I finally got to it.  These are my first ever quilled flowers and are certainly not the best ever made, but a few youtube videos and inspirational images online, and I got the basics down.  Not wanting to buy paper or a tool specifically for it, at least not for now, I used colored cardstock, cut thin strips myself, and used a toothpick to wind it around.

Viola-a one of a kind piece of work!  I attended BYU-Idaho for my degrees, and one of the rules of eligible housing was that a picture of a temple be in each room-to remind us of our covenants and our goals.  We've got one in our living room now, maybe this one will make it into the bedroom, or hallway :)