I thought I’d post a couple of holiday postcard collages since Christmas is only about 6 months away now!

I love the look of these vintage Santa Claus’ that I copied from old postcards. The background is old music sheets with gesso lightly brushed over. The Santa’s coats and hats are trimmed with glitter glue and I took some fake plastic snow (the kind that is glittery and chunky and comes in bags at the craft store) and glued it to the ground for the snow.

Here’s a couple more collages I’ve done on the fronts of post cards.

This first one is “Home Sweet Home”. I made the house from cutting squares and rectangles from scrapbook papers and tags from Foof-a-la. I love their line, very cool shabby chic stuff! The house number is an old game piece, I sewed on a real key to the bottom. The “Home Sweet Home” words were made on a label maker. I ran a very skinny strip of white core cardstock through the label maker and embossed on the letters than sanded over them to make it stand out more. The background is a tissue paper with house plans printed on it, 7 Gypsies makes these.

This next one is called “My Favorite Dress”. I took a plastic template of a dress and traced it on some paper that was a photocopy of some fabric. I aged it with lots of inks, it was very bright white and red before I started and I wanted it to look older and aged. The lace and button are vintage, as well as the piece from a very old tape measure. The background is another tissue paper from 7 Gypsies with dress making patterns printed on it.

Keeping with the theme of nature as inspiration here’s another collage using birds and a nest. I copied these images from an old biology book for children.
A tip about copying: For my collage images that I photocopy I like to use “Epson Photoquality Ink Jet Paper”, it’s the same thickness as regular printer paper but you get a very nice photo realistic look with it. That way you get a nice printed image without the bulk of most photo papers or cardstock. It’s a little expensive but well worth it!

I can’t get enough of these little hangers, they are a perfect way to display small pieces of art work. I believe Somerset Studio still has them for sale on their website.
http://www.stampington.com/html/the_shoppe.html

I can’t believe Easter is so early this year! Here’s another one of my postcard collages, this time with an Easter Egg theme. I used a template to cut the egg shape and used a rubber stamp from Stampendous to make it look crackled. The basket charm finished it off nicely I think.

I really love the popularity of eggs and bird images that has popped up lately, they really appeal to me for some reason. I recently painted my kitchen a robins egg blue and it’s beautiful. Nature is such a great source for inspiration:)

One of my favorite images to use in collage are fairies, I’m not sure why but I’m really drawn to them. I loved fairies and gnomes when I was little so I guess that’s always stuck with me. I usually use copies of old photographs for my fairies (I really love old photos of children for these) and add wings, usually butterfly wings and I like to make crowns for them too using metal paper or metal foil sheets. Here’s 2 I did recently, the backgrounds are pages from an old French text book mounted on cardstock, and I inked the edges and I just added a few embellishments to finish them off.

Ballerina Fairy:

King of the Faries:

I just finished some more post card collages, this time I wanted to make something for Valentine’s Day.

I used templates to trace and cut out my hearts and wings out of cardstock and then ran them through my Cuttlebug machine to emboss them. (If you don’t know what a Cuttlebug is it’s a little personal die cutting and embossing machine, I LOVE mine. It’s made by Provocraft and is available at most major craft stores and lots of places on line.) I then inked the embossing and the edges and attached the wings and heart to my background paper. To make the crowns I stamped the image using a permanent ink onto gold metal foil sheets and embossed with a stylus tool and cut them out and added a jewel for a little bling:) Then finished off with a few extra embellishments like a key and some old typewriter keys.