An experiment in vintage colours

I recently came across the work of Polish scrapbooker/artist Anna Dabrowska from the Prima design team (see her work here). I absolutely love the sense of colour and texture in her work - it's seriously gorgeous stuff!

Her work inspired me to try making a card using muted vintagey colours and layers of different textures.

The background was coloured with distress stains / inks (antique linen, vintage photo and victorian velvet) and then I built up a few layers of:

• vellum - coloured with antique linen, stamped with the Tim Holtz Papillon background in a brown archival ink, torn into strips and edged with victorian velvet
• Lace - stained with antique linen and swiped through a bit of victorian velvet on the craft sheet
• Lace effect cream paper ribbon edged with victorian velvet

I swiped a few brush fulls of rock candy crackle paint over parts of the whole thing for extra texture.

The butterflies were cut out of fabric using a Tim Holtz movers and shapers die. The fabric I used was some little squares (perfect size for the dies) that were actually samples of suede sofa fabric I kept from ages ago when we were choosing a new sofa (I new they'd come in handy eventually) - I love the feel of them :0)

I mounted the panel onto a book page distressed with vintage photo distress ink, and then onto a card blank. Finally, I stamped Happy Birthday onto some left over scraps of the book page, painted with a little cream acrylic paint first to lighten the text in the background.

It's a different style than other things I've done and about half way through I thought it was a disaster, but I persevered and now I hope you'll agree it's not actually turned out half bad  :0)

Thanks for stopping by.
xx

Dreaming of butterflies

I fancied trying out a technique from this months Craft Stamper magazine using tissue to build up layers of images and texture, and I just got some Tim Holtz distress stains so I wanted to try them out too.

I started off with a canvas board and swiped it over with the distress stains in wild honey, fired brick and walnut stain. I cut some pieces of heavy TH music print paper using the TH scrollwork on the edge die and coloured these with the wild honey stain before glueing onto the canvas.

Next I added a single layer of tissue over the whole canvas, soaking it on with diluted PVA glue. It wrinkles in places to add texture, and I worked it in around the scrollwork pieces so that they still appear slightly raised. The pattern on the paper is also still visible through the tissue.

Then I stamped my various images (stamps from Paperartsy, Tim Holtz, Debbi Moore) onto more pieces of tissue in black stazon  and glued them onto the canvas in the same way. Thanks to Florence at florenceandfreddie.wordpress.com for the tip of stamping with a layer of foam underneath the tissue for a better print - hop over to her blog to see some gorgeous bottles decorated using a stamped tissue technique.

Once it was all dry, I added some extra colour with the stains and a few more butterflies in black archival ink. Finally I rubbed some gold rub-on colour around the edges and lightly over the rougher bits to emphasize the texture. Oh and at some point I sprayed some heirloom gold perfect pearls over it.

Not too bad for a first attempt I think - the colours look better in real life too.

This last photo is just an ATC I was using to test out some of the techniques before using them on the main canvas, but I quite liked the way it turned out (even if the butterflies have smudges because I used distress ink then went over the top with more glue).

Sarah
xx

Weekly wishlist: Lets get anatomical!

In my day job I'm a psychologist working on the neuroscience of visual perception. I guess it's no surprise then that I find myself fascinated by images of eyes and brains and anything psychological, especially old textbook illustrations and diagrams which can be incredibly beautiful.  So... I thought I'd share a few cool crafty bits I've found on this theme.

First up on my wishlist is the oddities stamp set from Tim Holtz (and, while not strictly eye or brain related, the fab skeleton in the Haunted Mansion set must get a mention)

Etsy looks like it's a fantastic source for all sorts of anatomy related crafty ephemera:
Vision stamp from stampers anonymous - I love this one!
brain stamp
Blossom stamps has a few anatomical stamps including eyes and brains

Searching for phrenology also came up with some fab stuff, especially this amazing collage sheet

I could spend a fortune on digital collage sheets. There are so many wonderful vintage images available. Including these ones below from the magicpug and orangeclipart shops:

Thats enough for now. Remember your brain is beautiful! xx