Here’s a fun collage with an image of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland that I cut from a really cool old children’s pop up book I found. She’s surrounded by roses, tiny playing cards and real scrabble tiles. The background is a vintage bingo card, I added small metal eyelets to each corner that have different playing card suits. I attached red wire to the top to hang it from.
Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, my husband was on vacation so I decided to take a little break from creating and recharge a bit:)
Here’s a couple of fun altered collages pieces of fairies caught inside glass jars. I made the collage of the a fairy on a vintage book page and inserted it into a canning jar (the kind with no writing imprinted on them) and tucked some fake grass and paper flowers inside the bottom of the jar. I then aged a tag and stamped some neat sentiments on them, one says “Evidence” the other says “Dept of Antiquities” and tied them around the jars with cool ribbons. The lid of the jar was too shiny and new looking for me so I used a sponge and added some black permanent ink to age them up a bit.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! We always celebrate in my family because we’ve got a lot of Irish ancestors and it’s also my brother’s birthday. When we were little we always left a piece of cake out for the leprechauns 🙂
Sadly I don’t have anything green to share but instead it’s blue. It’s a bird shrine box. I took a small wooden box with a hinged and latched lid that also has a wire screen in the front and painted it blue then used Tim Holtz’ crackle paint and distress inks to age the box. I added a tiny tag to the front door with the word “fly” cut from a vintage book. Inside I made a tiny collage from an image of a blue jay on some vintage music paper and over the door added the words “three blue eggs” also from a vintage book. My favorite part is the tiny wire nest I made and glued inside. I took a very long piece of thin blue wire and ran three blue speckled beads onto the middle and just started wrapping the wire around and around and then pushing it down around the sides of the beads to form a nest shape. It’s the first one I’ve made and I think I’ll probably be going to get lots of wire to make more:) Then finally I glued three vintage game piece to the bottom for feet.
On Etsy there is a shop (open until the end of March) where all the proceeds go to The Red Cross to help people affected by the recent fires in Australia. There are loads of wonderful items donated from some terrific and generous artists for sale, you should really go buy something:) http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6902734
I belong to a team on Etsy called “Metsy”, it’s a group for mixed media artist and some of us have done paper mache houses to donate to the shop. Mine is listed here:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=21463566
be sure to also check out the other beautiful houses by my fellow team mates. A huge thanks to Stacey ( http://artsnark.blogspot.com/) for donating the blank houses!!
I took some pictures while I made mine and wanted to share my process.
I first painted the edges of the house with acrylic paint and cut out pages from a vintage children’s book and applied them to the house with gel medium:
Then I took pattern paper and cut out some scallop shapes for hills, a tree and a cloud and inked the edges with a sponge:
I then cut out a tree trunk from white core card stock and sanded it. I cut out an image of a little boy and some wings and a gold crown and glued the hill, tree trunk, tree top and fairy to the house. I also stamped a bird in the tree and music notes.
But….. I didn’t like the stamped bird and covered it with a vintage image of a bird from an old field guide:
The other side was a similar process of adding a hill, cloud, fairy flying a butterfly, stamped stars, etc. I also added rhinestones to the fairys clothes and Tim Holtz Distress glitter glue to all the wings. The sides of the house seemed too plain so I cut out and inked fun words like play, wish, laugh, fairy, etc and added them to the top and sides of the house:
I really love the finished house (and I hope it sells to help out with the relief effort:))
close ups:
I recently went through some stuff I had stored in my dad’s basement and found my old button jar. It’s a huge mason jar with tons of vintage buttons in it, I was so glad to find it:) I made a couple of soldered pendants with a couple of the more unusual ones.
This first one appears to be a shell button (maybe mother of pearl), the back side was pitted, dirty and had some cool green running through it. I cut the word “curiosity” from an old dictionary and added it to the button, glued it to a piece of vintage French book paper and sandwiched it between glass and using a wider tape than normal soldered around it. It makes for a very cool shadow box look I think.
The second one also looks to be shell, it’s white with a little sparkle to it and has a beautiful embossed design in it.
Here’s some more soldered collage jewelry for Valentine’s Day.
I love old movies and I really LOVE Cary Grant, he’s one of my all time favorite actors so I thought he’d make a great pendant. I used scrapbook paper for the background it has hearts and word all over, added a wonderful pic of Cary and I also cut out the words “Heart Throb” from an old dictionary.
This next one features an image of a sweet couple that I punched out in a heart shape over old book paper and I stamped the words “Key to My Heart”. The edged are done with scalloped soldering and a tiny key dangles from the bottom.
Made a couple of collage art Valentine cards today.
The first one is an image of a vintage couple, I mounted them on scallop edged black paper to look more like the old photos that have that type of edge, added some vintage lace and a pink paper heart with the word “love” cut from an old book. The background is vintage music paper that’s been stitched onto cardstock on my sewing machine and then mounted onto a pink card. There is also an old looking key tied with pink rick rack ribbon. The inside of the cards says “You hold the key to my HEART”
The next one is another of my felt owls (I’ve done other cards and ATC’s with him) sitting on a stamped branch, he’s also on vintage music paper surrounded by falling pink stamped hearts that’s stitched onto cardstock and mounted on a pink card. The outside says “Whooo Loves You” and the inside says “I do!”.
All stamps used are by Close To My Heart
