My Tim Holtz configuration box - what fun

I bought one of these boxes on the spur of the moment and then thought that I would probably never have the patience to actually do something with it.

However, over a few days I started to think about what I would like to do and decided to make something that had a "things that fly" theme. This meant I could enter it for the following challenges:

A Vintage Journey - things with wings
Fashionable stamping challenges - birds and bees
That's crafty challenges - birds
Scrap it girl - things with wings

I have been playing about with some of the tutorials in Tim Holtz' book A Compendium of Curiosities 3 and I wanted to use his layering stencils and distress paints for much of this project.

On the outside covers I started by putting a layer of  decoupage paper, this had a newspaper print design. I then added bits of various papers which had birds or butterflies. I added some gesso to give it all a bit of texture and then I painted different shades of distress paint. The next thing I did was to use different layering stencils to add colour and texture. Finally, I cut out some birds from Tom Holtz' Wallflower paper, added a trellis, which was embossed with rangers verdigris powder and a frame for the book's title .

This is what the front cover looks like:

This is a picture of the back of the box:

On the inside cover I used another paper from the Wallflower range and, again added DI paints using layering stencils. On the actual inside I used vintage brown crackle paint on each of the inner boxes.  Each box then had something that is connected to something that flies.

I absolutely loved doing this project and it has inspired me to do one for each of my grandchildren each of which will focus on something that they are interested in. I think there will be a lot of dinosaurs, pirates and princesses involved!

It's all just a little bit orangey

Our Creative Corner have a brilliant challenge because it uses my most favourite colour - orange. I love the vibrancy of it and in my classroom at school, I have one whole room painted in the most gorgeous bright orange.

For this tag I challenged myself to use as many different shades of orange as possible. The tag includes 5 different distress inks, a neon orange from Hero Arts a couple of the Ranger pigment inks and then finally, 2 different archival inks phew!

I really didn't want to add other colours to the tag and so I went with using black rub ons and then I used black embossing powder on the key, butterfly body and brads. The only other thing I added was some orange dots on the butterfly.

Tim Holtz Faux Tea Roses!

The CCC3 theme for this challenge is to make faux tea roses using Tim Holtz' Pinecone Die. I thought I might have to sit this one out as I didn't have the die and all the usual places where I shop for crafty things had sold out. However, I was lucky enough to find one on Ebay.

Now I had got it into my head that I wanted to alter a box. I picked up a really old, dirty second hand one for £2 last week and it has been playing on my mind. I also thought that making the flowers would be easy, but boy, was I wrong. I am not sure quite why I found making them so hard, but It took me almost 3 hours to make 7 that I was reasonably happy with. I definitely think these flowers will be something I need to carry on practicing. Mind you, when they go right they are so pretty that they are worth persevering with.

For the box, I wanted to include three things. The roses, the Botanical Tea Party paper from Graphic 45 and lots of different layers of paint so it looked as though the box was really old and tattered.

In the end I was really happy with the inside of the box. The paper and the gold leaf look lovely together. I was less happy with the outside. I think it looks a bit disjointed with the cut out images glued on. but my daughter, who I made it for, loves it and so that is all that matters

The box in its original state

The other pictures show the inside and outside of the box and close-ups of the flowers and also the gold leaf.

A vintage seaside part 2

This is the other project I made for the Frilly and Funky blog. I think if I were to do it again I would make the card a bit smaller as there is a lot of space. What I really like is the film strip and, bizarrely, the seagull! I also like the muted colours and the effect of the muslin netting. I knew I wanted real seashells somewhere on the project, but didn't have any. Then on Monday my daughter went shopping in a local charity shop and found a little box covered in small spiral shells and she bought it for me.

A vintage seaside part one

Over at the Frilly and Funkie Challenge blog the theme is a vintage seaside and I thought it sounded like fun. However, being quite new at all of this, I wasn't sure whether my finish product would be described as frilly or funky, so I actually made 2 different things.

This one here is a tag, which I wanted to look as though it was old and had been sitting in a cupboard somewhere ageing nicely. I had very limited stamps etc to use for this theme, but even so I was pleased with how it turned out.