Art Creations Friday Challenge

This is my project for this week's challenge at Art Creations Friday. I made the little Edwardian girl a world traveler. I'm sure she had many memorable voyages with her steamer trunk (an image from French Kissed) and based on her sailor suit, she probably crossed the Atlantic and sent many postcards home from all her travels!

Theme Thursday - Collage

At Theme Thursday this week, the challenge is to make a collage. Armed with my new-found knowledge from Mary Green's online vintage gluebook class I took, I had great fun making a collage with a variety of elements. Main image: Paper Whimsy.

Tag Tuesday - Postage

The challenge at Tag Tuesday this week is to use a postage stamp on your tag. Awhile ago I found out about postage people where you use a stamp with a person's face and then create a body for it. So I used a stamp on top of this fun collage style stamp from Artistic Outpost's Generation Redux set. What do you think of my postage person? Other stamps used are from Studio 490 and Oxford Impressions.

Compendium of Curiosities Challenge #2

Basic use of Fragments is this week's Compendium of Curiosities challenge. I used some Tim Holtz paper with my circular fragments and paired them with stamps from Basic Grey both on the fragment and on the background paper.

Sunday Postcard Art - Sea Voyages

This is a postcard for the SPA challenge this week with a theme of Sea Voyages. I combined this great vintage image of sailboats getting ready to leave the dock with a postcard scrap and a border stamp from Technique Tuesday.

Tag Tuesday - Men

In honor of Fathers' Day, Louise's Tag Tuesday challenge has a masculine theme. OK, so I definitely have a feminine bend with my work, but my Dad says I'm improving with my masculine cards, so I went with metal, wire, Distress Embossing powder, a map piece and a blueprint scrap. I flattened a really big bottlecap and used the powder on it. FYI - metal really gets HOT when embossing it.....not that anything bad happened in creating this tag....... Image: Digital Collage Sheets, Stamps: Technique Tuesday.

Linda's Compendium of Curiosities Challenge

Linda Ledbetter is hosting a challenge (follow this link HERE) using techniques in Tim Holtz's new book A Compendium of Curosities. The first challenge is waterstamping. I love the effect this technique gives! I'm just not sure about my colors.....I wanted to do something a little brighter, after all, today was a bright sunny day, but maybe I got a little carried away....
Distress Ink colors used: Mustard Seed, Rusty Hinge, Spiced Maramalade, Barn Door, and Fired Brick. Stamps: Stamper's Anonymous and Stampington

Altered Journal

Thought I'd share a project I just completed making a journal from an old book. I've sewn in pages Glimmer Misted with turquoise, lily pad, and jazz blue mists. I really think I'm getting an addiction to these books!

My "helpers"

This is Matilda - my original project kitten - who is "helping" me with tea dyeing watercolor paper for an online journal class I'm taking. Carole Brungar, aka kiwicarole from NZ has a class using paper and fabric and transfers that you can find out more about on her blog post HERE. I had to spread out my paper to dry throughout my kitchen one night after work this week. And yes, I do have cat footprints on it now! I think they'll make a nice artistic element, don't you?

Next up is Metzger, who pretty much gets away with anything, but as you can see, has a different way of "helping". He participated in the walnut ink experiments using glass rims and salt. I did manage to save my bowl of walnut ink before he dunked his foot in it!


After everything dried, I came away with some pretty interesting backgrounds. The top photo is using Red Zinger tea and the second is using walnut ink and salt. Moral of the story? Next time I'm going to wait for daylight and work outside!!!!!!!!!!

Tag Tuesday - A Few of my Favorite Things

For this week's challenge at Tag Tuesday, we were to use a few of our favorite things combined together on the tag. So my list goes like this:
1. I used my favorite background technique of combining collaged bits of text and music papers and Distress Inks
2. One of my favorite Paper Whimsy images - actually, I have a LOT of favorite Paper Whimsy images, but I've always loved this particular girl and her wistful look
3. A layered and embellished paper flower
4. Flourishes - I stamped Tim Holtz's fab flourish stamp first using pearl paint, but when that didn't stand out enough, I stamped again with black ink and the pearl gives fun highlights - don't you love happy accidents? Hey, that's another of my favorite things!
5. Glimmer Misted lace - everything's just better with Glimmer Mist!

Louise wrote on her blog post for the challenge that as she's seen the various tags over the past year she's been doing Tag Tuesday, she can recognize a certain artist by their style now. So what do you think - does this take look like "me"?

Litchfield, Maine ATC

This is an ATC created for a swap and thought I'd share the story behind it. The image is from a postcard I found at a flea market a few years ago postmarked in 1912 and it's actually of my road! My house is just a little bit farther down on the left, and yes, I really do live in Purgatory! The story goes that a traveler to the area complained that the mosquitoes and black flies were so horrible that it was like being in Purgatory and the name stuck. Just had to add the one penny postage stamp, too - just seemed appropriate...........;-)

Gluebook again

Wanted to share this gluebook page because it's the first I've done using one of my own family photos - this is my Grandma as a little girl.

Gluebook pages

You'd think with the rainy weekend we've had, I would have more projects to share; I didn't have a very crafty weekend - but my house is clean......not really sure if that's a good trade-off...... Here are two more pictures from my gluebook that I did this weekend.

Vintage Gluebook

I'm really enjoying playing with my gluebook! Here are two more pages to share.