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