Celebrating our Anniversary at A Vintage Journey

Hi everyone. A Vintage Journey is celebrating it's 6th Anniversary! I know blogs and challenge blogs have lost some of their popularity but this one is very dear to me. I have made good friends, many of who I have met because of this blog. I have also been inspired by many artists both from the Design Team and those who have entered our challenges.

Brenda who created and started this blog is our host this month. We are looking for Celebration themed creations - let us know what you are celebrating!

My card is for one of those crafty friends who celebrate their birthday this month.

My background is some printed paper which I added some washes on paint to to tone it down a little. I painted and crackled some corrugated card as the base for my Tattered Butterfly.

The butterfly was cut from greyboard and texture paste added which I randomly stamped into to create texture. Once dry I painted black, dry brushed with white and then added washes on paint.

Under the butterfly are some weird extra wings. These are actually part of a wildflower die that I altered and really wanted to use but it didnt work with my layout so I improvised. 

A few crackled arrows, some fibres....

and some little squares complete my card. I hope you like it!

We hope you will join us for our celebratory challenge. 

Nikki 

xxxxx

Tattered Butterfly Shadow Box

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop at Country View Crafts with A Vintage Journey's owner Brenda Brown. Brenda is a great teacher, her projects are always so well planned with lots of techniques and always a gorgeous composition. I was inspired by this and adapted her ideas to create my Tissue Paper project for our latest challenge at A Vintage Journey.

This is Brenda's original design - and here is a link to her blog post.

By Brenda Brown

I changed mine slightly to use butterflies rather than bunnies!

Nikki's version

My new version incorporates Tim Holtz Botanical Collage Paper and other images stamped onto tissue paper for my background. This version is a little smaller and instead of card I used corrugated box card for my background. I added some gesso and crackle paint before adding my tissue papers to the surface. I then painted elements of the background - the leaves and berries.

My butterflies and frame used techniques from the workshop so it would be unfair to share them in detail here - but I am sure you can see crackle paint and lots of painty layers! 

Tissue paper is a great way to get stamped images onto a textured surface like corrugated card. The images may distort a little but on this sort of project it doesn't matter!

There is lots more Tissue Paper inspiration at A Vintage Journey today. Astrid is our host and this is what she says:

There are many different ways you can incorporate tissue paper into your project - create texture by scrunching it up, stain it, paint it, wax it, stamp on it, emboss on it. You could use cheap tissue from the supermarket, recycle gift wrapping tissue, or even use old dressmaking patterns. Just remember to create in one of our preferred styles of vintage, shabby, mixed media, art journaling, industrial, timeworn or steampunk.

So do pop over and take a peek!

Nikki

xxx

Tattered Butterfly Birthday

Just stopping by to share a some cards I have made using the new Tattered Butterfly die from Tim Holtz. I made a few more but were sent in the post before I took photos! They are all a similar design - just different colours and papers.

On some I created inky layers to contrast with the printed papers. Love this effect of inking a stencil, spritzing and stamping with it.

Back soon!

Nikki

xxx