Today is July 4th, Independence Day, and often when you hear the words “stars and stripes” used together.

Since last week’s prompt was “stripes”, I decided today’s ought to be “stars”.  I would like to say I’m clever enough to have planned the whole thing, but the truth is I’m not and I didn’t.  It came to me as I was wondering what today’s page should be about.  Never one to look the gift horse of a good idea in the mouth, I simply went with it.

My stars are a sheet of Sticky Snippets™ Large Stars I created weeks ago and then couldn’t decide how to use.  Since they were done and I needed stars, they became the basis for the page.

I needed color and a stencil, so pulled some of the Heidi Swapp Color Shine sprays and some of my diluted versions of Dylusions Ink Sprays.  The stencil is my Starlight design which was new in May this year.

I decided to add color to the page before using the stencil.  A couple of quick blasts of the sprayer yielded this.

Here’s the page after I used the Starlight stencil and the stars from the Punchinella Trio 2 one.  I used the two Color Shine colors to spritz through them.

As an aside, there was a lot of spray left on the Starlight stencil that I didn’t want to waste, so I grabbed a sheet of Small Stars Sticky Snippets™ and turned the stencil over and placed it on top, allowing the liquid to absorb into the sheet.

And then took the other color of Color Shine and spritzed through the openings, coloring the white inside of the stencil openings.  Theoretically, this will give me a sheet with two colors and no white space left.  Or very little.  As you’ll see there ends up being more white space than I thought, but that’s ok.  Because I sprayed the second Color Shine color through the openings, once again I had a pile of liquid on top of the stencil, so I turned it over…

And applied it to another sheet of Sticky Snippets™.  That’s the sheet you see on the right.  You could go on and on like this, but I stopped here.  It becomes a crazy cycle of not wanting to waste the spray and ending up using more, landing you right back at the beginning.

Back to our regularly scheduled AJA page…

A light spritz of Tumbled Glass Distress Spray Stain moves the page away from being so pink.

And I’ve decided there aren’t enough stars on the page, so I grabbed the Punchinella Quintet stencil (that features mini versions of some of the original Punchinella 1 and Punchinella 2 stencils) and some Pomegranate Seed Dylusions Paint and got busy with one of the Mini Ink Blending Tools.

Testing a star from the sheet of Sticky Snippets™ to see how it looks…

And I may have lost my mind for a moment, which  is when I decided more stars were required.  Out came the Black Marble Dylusions Paint and on go more stars, this time from the Punchinella Trio  2 Stencil.

The page has gotten a little out of control (maybe a lot?), but I’m going to see it through to the bitter end.  Primarily because it’s Sunday morning of a holiday weekend and I’m nearly out of time.  I digress.

So on go the stars from the Sticky Snippets™ sheet .  They’re not standing out from the background enough (really, what could it’s so bloody busy?) so I used a black Sharpie Extra Fine Point Paint Pen to outline around them.

What better way to subdue that background than with some black dots?  Black Marble Dylusions Paint applied with a twist of the Mini Ink Blending Tool to make big fat round dots.

Then small dots made with the White Sharpie Extra Fine Paint Pen are added to the big fat black dots and the page is officially finished.  And completely out of control.  (Sh)It happens.