Hanging Heart – Create a story of soulful moments

Well August is marching on, I can't believe how quickly the months are going. Autumn is just round the corner.

I have an altered wooden heart for you today, you know the ones you can pick up for about £1.50 in the Range. I’ve tried to keep it fairly light in colour but with a vintage shabby style.

Process steps

Scrape Fresco Finish paints in chocolate, stone, vintage lace and cream over the heart and let dry.

Paint over some PaperArtsy metallic glaze and old gold FF paint.

Edge the heart with the old gold.

Splat a little victorian velvet and dried marigold distress stains on the craft mat and dip the heart in one colour at a time, mist lightly and let colour drip then heat dry, repeat for the next colour.

Make up the embellishments – the book plate, heart, bottle, metal wings and top hat were given a coat of gesso to seal them. When dry they were coated with clear distress crackle paint along with the flower, bead and butterfly.

They were all coloured with victorian velvet, dried marigold, rusty hinge and walnut stain distress stains.

The muse token,pen nib and washer were given the rusted treatment using crafty notions rusting powder.

Blend some Onyxite treasure gold over the rusted items and the neck of the bottle.

Cut a star from the industrious stickers and push into the coffee archival ink pad to colour it brown.

Distress the TH ticket, cut to shape to fit inside the bookplate.

Colour the crinoline flower with the distress stains.

Using the stuff to say set of TH stamps stamp the long set of words and cut out the ones you want for your personal quote. Edge them with walnut stain DI.

Now we are ready to assemble it all together. I was tempted to add some stamping, remnant rubs and/or texture paste to the background but in the end I didn’t because I wanted the distressed elements to stand out on the grungy base.

Hope you like my altered heart today, thanks for taking the time to stop by and take a look at what I am creating.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

 
Enjoy the rest of the week.

 

hugs Brenda

Nothing ventured, nothing gained – Positivity Journal

Hello Everyone, I hope you have had a good week. I thought I would share another of the altered playing cards that I have been making ).

Although I have been following the ideas and techniques from Stephanie Ackerman, I am using different colours and am using them in my small Positivity Journal. I have two to share over the coming week or so, both using the same design on the card, but different colour combinations on the pages.

The background was made with tissue wrap, daubed with distress paints and wiped back in places with a babywipe.

Sprays and masks/stencils create some great texture and contrasting colour …..

…. and tissue tape adds another layer to the depth.

A computer generated quote to help me remember to always try new techniques and look for new ideas.

Another one of these soon.

Have a fabulous week and take care.

hugs Brenda xxx

Tag Friday - Cracked Seahorse

Today is Tag Friday with the winners' announcement at A Vintage Journey and I am contributing a seahorse tag as I just love the sea themed creatures on Tim’s dies.

The background was made with Tim’s bubble embossing folder, inked before running it through the Big Shot and then spritzed with water and dipped in some more salty ocean DI. I heat dried it and gave some depth to the bubbles by painting them over with white linen dylusions ink.

The starfish was cut from card painted with antique linen distress paint, edged with walnut stain and when dry a coat of rock candy distress crackle paint and some micro beads added to it. I love the texture it gives.

The seahorse was given the same treatment minus the beads and inked over with walnut stain DI.

I didn’t feel this needed many embellishments so I chose these two which I painted with antique linen DP before adding them to the finished tag.

The seaweed was made by cutting up the fronds from some green card run through Tim’s waves embossing folder, dipped in some white linen ink and edges with walnut stain DI.

Before bringing everything together I added some stamped text and distressed and inked the edges of the tag.

I hope you will have time to create something for yourself and for our latest challenge ‘Tim Flies’ before it ends next Thursday.

Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by.

hugs {brenda} xxx

Another Lynne Perrella journal page

I have been having great fun in my journals over the past couple of months and this is one of the pages where I have loved using the Lynne Perrella stamps. Way back in the year I would have told you that I didn’t like these sets of stamps – it was because I didn’t know how I could use them. Now I adore them and love playing with bright colours and these gorgeous images.

I sprayed, blended and dried Dylusions spray inks.

I sprayed through a stencil and used the surplus ink on the back of it.

I stamped some background text and masked the bottom border to be able to stamp the corner foliage.

I also used the faux bleach technique again for the face.

I used a waterbrush to colour in other areas.

I used a white posca pen to add highlights and …..

….. I stamped the saying on a piece of sprayed card and adhered it to the page.

Lots of layers here and a recipe you could easily follow yourself if you wanted to try something similar.

Thanks for stopping by.

Take care.

hugs Brenda xxx

Layered Bee - Where have you been?

I have used a cork tile as my substrate for this project creating a collage using the Tim Holtz Layered Bee die and embossing folder.

More details are over on the Country View Crafts Project Blog if you have time to pop over.

You will see how I created the dimensional wings for this gorgeous creature.....

... and other effects to create some texture.

Thanks for stopping by today to take a look at my ‘Where have you bee’n?’ tile.

hugs brenda xxx

Time Flies at A Vintage Journey

I seem to be repeating this statement over and over again and I really can’t believe how quickly time passes, even more so as I get older (funny that’s just what my Mum used to say too).

Today sees us start another leg of the journey and it’s Chris who is asking us to think about time – her brief is about - ‘Anything relating to the passing of time which includes Tim's products - stamps, dies, Idea-ology etc. This is down to your interpretation of how quickly time passes and how you can demonstrate it but we want to see Tim's techniques too please. The world's your oyster’.

So a bit of Tim technique, a bit of Tim stamping, a bit of Tim embellishing, ok so this is what came out of it all.

I am afraid I didn’t take the cue about time passing, instead I did a literal interpretation, more about time flying. So I have altered a clock and added one of Tim’s pocket watches.

I had great fun shabbying up this watch with antique linen distress paint and using a clock face stamp from Mini Classics and some painted cogs and hands. I also stamped the long list of words from Stuff to Say and added the Timeless sentiment.

The bird is from Nature Walk, stamped with vintage photo, walnut stain and weathered wood distress inks and I painted in some broken china and edged with walnut stain and a brown permanent pen. It seemed rather flat so I added some details with the brown pen and then gave it a coat of clear distress crackle paint.

The background was made using Tim's clock face embossing folder where I rubbed walnut stain DI over it before running it through the Big Shot with some oyster coloured card. It then had layers of antique linen and broken china DIs and some light mists of water, making sure it was heat dried in between each new layer.

The clock was taken to pieces and given three coats of Decoart chalk paint starting with  and adding some candle rubs in between which allows me to rub away parts of each layer to expose the original wood and the other colours of paint. I also rubbed in some walnut stain distress ink.

I continued working on the clock case by adding some TH remnant rubs and distressing them with the stiff brush he uses, then I dry-brushed with some of the lace chalk paint, then used the three colours of paints through Tim’s harlequin stencil – this really shabbied it up.

To pull the inside together I used distress paint over some small metal cogs and adhered the background, watch, bird, cogs and words into the clock case.

Once I had found a small piece of chain I had the focal part of the clock and the remit for the challenge theme – Time Flies.

This made a real change for me to upcycle and alter something, haven’t done much of it lately and this was great fun. In fact I think it’s good enough for the conservatory and dust free to as all the parts are behind glass.

hugs Brenda xxx

A Bright Future – Crafty Individuals

I just fell in love with this turtle stamp when I found him tucked inside an envelope on my return from holiday at the end of May, what a lovely surprise especially as I had only just seen real live turtles on a beach in Hawaii a few days before. 

A week later I made this tag for Crafty Individuals and I am a bit late posting it. I think this ought to go in my Positivity Journal don't you?

The background is broken china distress paint brushed onto the tag and flicked with water, I added some bubbles and sea greenery (using the bump technique) to give the effect of being underwater.

The turtle was stamped onto watercolour paper and I coloured him in with my new watercolours.

The small sentiment is part of the stamp set and the larger one is computer generated.

The leaves were inked through a Dylusions mask.

I'm off on holiday to Lanzarote soon with all the family and am looking forward to some quality time with them all. This time it's a pool and beach holiday so no turtles to find here.

I hope your week is going well.

hugs Brenda

4 more altered playing cards

Hello Everyone, it's been a fabulous week here at the Brown household with Ken's birthday Thursday and our 40th wedding anniversary on the same day. Last night we celebrated with the children and grand children having a lovely meal out together and tonight we celebrate with a few friends and neighbours by having a summer garden BBQ. We just hope it doesn't rain after all the wonderful hot sunny weather we had in July.


 Today I thought I would share four altered playing cards that I have been making (you can seer the previous 4 here that I made in March if you haven’t caught up with them yet)

Although I followed the ideas and techniques from Stephanie Ackerman, I am using images and collage pieces of my own. 

I save quotes and make my own sheets and print out to use in albums, on cards and mixed media projects.

I won’t share the process steps in respect for Stephanie and her online class, but suffice to say I am enjoying making these and having fun exploring some mixed media techniques.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

hugs {brenda} xx